With and incredibly long and obscure album title and seventeed tracks in less than 30 minutes, it should be obvious that we are dealing with a grindcore album in the form of Nolentia's May the Hand That Holds the Match That Will Set This World on Fire be Blessed Above All.
Throughout the albums 29 minutes, the French trio unleashes one relentless onslaught of blastbeats after another upon the listener, whi is treated to non-stop grincore chaos, in the form of brutal guitar figures accompanied by a heavily distorted bass (which at times sounds like Danny Lilker's bass on the Nuclear Assault classic Out of Order) and vocals that, taking cues from early Napalm Death, combine death grunts with high pitched screams.
As grindcore goes, this release – nihilistic though it is – belongs to the less silly end of the grindcore continuum, and the intensity definitely works well. That being said, the album quickly get monotonous, and, if you do not understand, or like, grindcore, chances are that this will not be the album to convert you. The album's odd man out, the heavy and sludgy track 'The Second Principle' is last of the tracklist and thus occurs too late to make any impact in terms of variation.
But fans of the genre are bound to appreciate the band's ability to grind away and retain the intensity and grindcore chaos throughout the entire album. And Nolentia deserve credit for making quality extreme music, which is not always what is emphasized in the world of grindcore.
Tracklist:
1. The Boiling Frog Principle
2. A Lament for the Roadkill
3. Broken Toys
4. Xie Xie
5. Too Far Gone
6. On this Side of the Grave
7. More to Fear
8. Encoded
9. Wright
10. The Ticking of the Clock
11. Et in Acedia Ego
12. Gasoline
13. Darwinian
14. All About
15. The Glorious March of Progress
16. Better
17. The Second Principle
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