After a handful of years away from the studio, Magrudergrind has returned with their heart-racing album, II (Relapse). For twenty-three and a half minutes, the grindcore outfit will punch you in the stomach, throw you to the ground, and then help you back up for more. I personally did not have a large sample size of the bred in Washington D.C., now in Brooklyn, NY trio prior to listening to this album, but this album has put me on a quest to find more. A perfect mix of grindcore and power violence kept me interested from start to finish with no real breaks in the action.

I always find it a bit difficult to pick out favorite songs on an album where most of the tracks are less than two minutes (not saying that is a bad thing either). One of those songs is actually just shy of three and a half minutes, ‘Black Banner.’ As one of the few points in the albums where things slow down and get heavy, this abnormally long track from Magrudergrind will have you violently head bang and then two-step all over your living room. Speaking of long songs, the other longer than typical track on the album is ‘Unit 731.’ This song starts off with that slow, heavy feel again but eventually snaps into a more traditional grindcore song. The song certainly felt like it had multiple personalities with these two sides to make up one of the more memorable tracks on II.

I was very impressed with this latest effort from Magrudergrind and probably in part that it took quite a few years to get some new material. Yet, it sounds like not a single step was lost from the group.

7.0/10

TIM LEDIN

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