SAYYADINA

Variety is not essential when it comes to grindcore, nor is it even expected, particularly when the speedometer reaches face-melt or when the band hits that indefinable sweet spot that turns ordinary average Joes into knife-wielding psychopaths. Sweden has covered both ends of the spectrum in a manner befitting its proud tradition of superior extremity. As it turns out, many of the grind acts in the meaty part of the Swedish curve reveal cracks and crevices fill with crust, also befitting the country's proud tradition of superior extremity. If you know anything at all about the magnificence of VICTIMS, GENERAL SURGERY, and NASUM, then it will come as no surprise that SAYYADINA — whose members came from all three acts — tends toward the face-melting, crusty 'n psychotic end of the grindcore spectrum.

The entirety of "The Great Northern Revisited" then is comprised of songs from the band's split 7" records and compilations, and also includes four previously unreleased cuts. That would be 30 songs in just under 30 minutes for the uninitiated among you that may have been led to believe that grindcore albums typically consist of four to six epic songs that together clock in somewhere between 60 and 75 minutes. Getting down to brass tacks, as somebody once said, "The Great Northern Revisited" is a good, not great, grindcore collection that features all sorts of shrapnel blasting and fast/loose moments of battiness and calamity, inclusive of vocals that instead of typically alternating between death-bark and eardrum piercing shriek, tend to often fall somewhere in the middle, never giving one the impression that the person standing at the microphone is in possession of all his faculties. Those needing breaks from the wilding will find SAYYADINA's periodic incorporation of quick pace shifts and brief musical detours most pleasing.

"The Great Northern Revisited" does make a clean break from the mundane and the mediocre, even if it does not reek of instant classic. It rattles the bones, it frays the nerve endings, and it wreaks havoc on the destabilized brain. That in summation is pretty much the point of all this madness.