Blast Worship: Wreck

Where they from?
Giessen, Germany. Apparently Giessen is the home of the “Giessen 46ers,” a basketball team that has won the Basketball Bundesiglia championship five times. Fun fact: professional wrestler Kevin Nash actually played for them towards the end of his pro basketball career. Wow, talk about the absolute insane shit you find when you look up random german towns on Wikipedia. Tune in next week when we find out Hulk Hogan started off as a batboy for the Albequerque Isotopes.

Why the hype?
OK, so one complaint I have about a lot of the current grind/violence bands from the United States is how weak a lot of it feels, just an overall sense of not being hard-hitting. Not these Giessen heart throbs, everything about their music feels SUPERPOWERED, OVERCHARGED, like CAPTAIN PLANET HIMSELF suffocating you with his muscular thighs. Alright, got weird there.

Wreck’s music is basically a masterclass in how modern clean production should sound for a grindcore band. The drum sounds in particular are incredibly powerful, digitalized, yes, but intense nonetheless. The punching one-two of the kick and snare tones partnered with the in-your-face vocals create a blistering sonic intensity that simply cannot be denied. Like, if you play this band loud enough, I’m pretty sure your neighbor’s lawn would die.

Latest release?
Wreck…Everything! EP. OK, let’s talk about the breakdown in “Hotline Burnout.” There’s always much discourse in grindcore circles in the legitimacy of breakdowns and mosh parts in this kind of music, and a whole bunch of your very-not-fun friends will ceaselessly complain about how “it’s just a dumb hardcore trick!” Well, honestly if you want to live your life applying the same puritanical standards to a counter-culture that was born out of protesting such a paradigm of thinking, then BE MY FUCKING GUEST! The rest of us actual fun-havers will be windmilling the shit out of each other in basketball jerseys to this absolute beast of a track while you cry in your Terrorizer longsleeve.

Bandcamp