Here’s one for you if you happen to have an unhealthy fascination with punishingly ugly, monomaniacal hardcore. Grout’s brief, five-track demo comes at you like a big pair of hairy, sausage-fingered hands: one to wrap around your scrawny throat and the other to repeatedly punch you in your stupid gibbering mouth. Absolutely everything here seems gruntingly furrow-browed (simple, stomping rhythms; huge knobbly riffs; etc.) and this puts it in the same rough place as all those other bands with names as simple, blunt and single-syllable as their music … Gag, Bib, Cell and the like. While that’s all pretty great things finish on a bit of a bum note with a sloppy rendition of Devo’s ‘Mongoloid’ – a decision that seems goadingly needless in 2021, though I guess that’s probably the pointless point they were trying to make with it.
