Review by www.metal-observer.com

Grindcore and its purveyors don’t do nuance. There are no further modifiers or moderations necessary. It is what it is, and you like it or you don’t. Those are truly pretty weak platitudes in regard to this seemingly ever-growing movement but those truths remain, even after nearly 30 years of the genre’s solid presence. In fact it may be news to many youthful Metalheads that Grindcore is probably the oldest style of Extreme Metal still in existence. Its limited audience is due to just how ferocious and inaccessible a lot of the music is to even many who love their music in the mental-as-fuck arena of the sonic panorama. TERSANJUNG13 and GRINDBASHERS aren’t going to change any of that.

Coming out of the lowly Metal represented Indonesia, TERSANJUNG13 are as raw and corrosive a band as I’ve heard in many a moon. Playing Grind with an abandon, it is slightly difficult on their short excursion here to tell whether this chaos is borne solely of their frontal attack on their instruments or something also conveyed by a pretty shoddy production. I suspect a little of the latter, but there’s no denying the band’s commitment to utter destruction through ripping blast-beats, a fuzzy, suffocating monster guitar sound and a vocalist who sounds like a feral cannibal. The eight songs TERSANJUNG13 provide on this split are primo examples of the slash & burn aesthetic of Grindcore at its most viscous. The songs fly by at the expected ferocious clip, leaving you with just enough of a taste.

It’s not difficult to realize when the album moves from the Indonesian slayers to the more established German outfit GRINDBASHERS. With a super distorted bass line the band thrusts into a 14 second assault on their first track “Means Nothing”. Where TERSANJUNG13’s vocals are of the ear-piercing scream variety, GRINDBASHERS’ vocalist Herrie is couched firmly in the guttural end of the extreme spectrum of communicating. Though not startlingly so, the production does cleanup a bit once GRINDBASHERS’ pummeling commences. With a more congealed sense to their riffs, the band separates itself again; eschewing purely blast-beats and light speed aesthetics to their furious dispatches. “Sick Fanatics” is a good example, proceeding with a slow-pace and more conventional riff structure; sure the song careens out of this to insane world after a moment or so, but after all this is a Grindcore band, it’s that they allow themselves some breadth that is noticeable. Solid if not inspiring, the band unleashes a hefty dose of jugular-compressing music that is the lifeblood of the genre.