### Nails: Unsilent death

#### 19/08/10 || Khlysty

You know, most people who declare that they don’t like heavy metal, argue that their repulsion is caused by metal’s aggression and brutality. Most of these wimps have never listened to Nails; ‘cause if they had, they wouldn’t talk about aggression and brutality, but they would have run away screaming in terror, while their brains would be seeping out of their ruptured eardrums and their eyes would be popping outta them sockets, while their innards would be compressed into an amorphous pulp and would drip outta their ripped anal canal and,… well you get the picture.

Nails hails from SoCal and plays one hell of an aggressive and brutal mix of hardcore and grindcore, kinda like –as their label says- Entombed covering Napalm Death, with a dash of Discharge, if I might add. Or something. Well, lemme tell ya that them boys pack in a ten-songs-in-fourteen-minutes album more punch, venom and sheer hatred than other bands manage to contain in looooooong –and pretty obsolete…- discographies. If one likes his grind as hard-hitting and to-the-point as humanly possible, “Unsilent Death” seems like a fucking encapsulation of one’s every wet dream.

The guitars have a burly growly sound that comes out of the speakers like a crazy guy, armed with a tyre iron and with the sole purpose of killing you, robbing you, fucking you, burning you, fucking you again and, then, pissing and defecating on whatever is left of your carcass. The bass does the same, only a bit more brutally and the drums move with scary ease from blasting with the best of them, to d-beat madness, to beakdowns designed to topple medieval castles and back. The vocals are you usual shout/scream, but with a terrifying edge, which makes the singer sound, not like your basic pissed-off punker/grinder, but like someone who long ago abandoned sanity for the more comforting lands of mania.

The production, done in God City Studios by Kurt Ballou, of Converge fame, is fucking phenomenal. Every instrument has enough breathing space to shine and when everything is mixed together, what comes out sounds like a rabid tyrannosaur on a killing spree. Everything sounds as grimy and aggressive as humanly possible and the production, combined with the songs inherent brutality, makes the record one of the best shit to come out in 2010. Out of ten songs, seven never reach the minute mark, one barely touches ninety seconds and the other two seem more deliberately composed (one is almost three minutes long, the other almost four), while the trio never loses focus of its mission which seems to be to rip your face off.

Look, I’ve already said much too much: Nails is your new poison, even if you’re not a fan of grind/hardcore/powerviolence, and “Unsilent Death” is one of the best, most uncompromising records I’ve listened to in a long time. This is the true ugly face of metal and I dare you to look at it…

- Information
- Released: 2010
- Label: Six Feet Under/Streetcleaner
- Website: none
- Band
- Todd Jones: guitar, vocals
- John Gianelli: bass
- Taylor Young: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Conform
- 02. Scum will rise
- 03. Your god
- 04. Suffering soul
- 05. Unsilent death
- 06. Traitor
- 07. I will not follow
- 08. No servant
- 09. Scapegoat
- 10. Depths