Labels: Fat Ass
Review by: Alex Deller
Always had a lot of time for Excruciating Terror: their raging, crust-damaged grind always cut straight to the chase and fit nicely alongside all those other grubby-sounding bands on Pessimiser like Phobia, Grief and Despise You. Their side of this record comprises three songs that were recorded live. Why in god’s name anyone ever tries to document a live grindcore set is rather beyond me, but the first two songs (one apiece from each of the band’s albums) at least sound half decent, with the meaty guitar tone and coughed-up vocals cutting through the rabid blur of everything else. The third track was taken from another set and appears to be hitherto unreleased (barring an appearance on another live record) but suffers from a weedy production job that really doesn’t do anyone any favours. Oh well. Cyness have been around for something like 15 years, and while I’ve seen them pop up on many a distro list I think the only time our paths have crossed was on a Skitsystem split. Here they play four songs that I’m fairly indifferent to: adequately-played if poorly-recorded grind that reels in some occasional Acme-style dissonance. The bass and drums are gruel-thin and dominated by a horrible-but-not-in-a-good-way guitar sound and some garden variety vocals. This ends things on an unimpressive note, and you can’t help but think that a band who’ve been around this long should at least have managed to get their bloody sound sorted out.