TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION

A few years ago I said some album or band was "more underground than Rich Hoak in a mine shaft." The former BRUTAL TRUTH man has more than lived up to my lame joke since that band's initial dissolution — as a member of TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION, he carries on their tradition of thinking man's grindcore, clever bits of guitar and impossibly catchy vocal parts tossed into a maelstrom of blasts and furious noise. It's a barely controlled chaos, seething with anger, gallows humor, and disgust with the world today and its fucked-up denizens who let things get so stupid.

While the delivery may be a noisy squall, TFD are actually doing some pretty structured songs here, little mini-epics that rage with an urgency most cookie-cutter grindcore doesn't match. It's the combination of clear-headed vision and one-take wild-eyed abandon that makes TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION so essential, spiritual anarchic descendents of BRUTAL TRUTH, S.O.B. and TERRORIZER (whose "Enslaved By Propaganda" they cover here). The first ten songs here are blistering grind anthems smart and unique enough to reach crusty punks, open-minded hardcore kids and plenty of other people who thought grind was for idiots.

And just when you get comfortable with their frantic speed, TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION shifts gears and coughs up five acoustic numbers! I'm not sure how much staying power an acoustic-guitar and snare-with-brushes rendition of "Bio-Satanic Terroristic Attack" or "Kill the Jocks and Eat Their Brains" will have, but it's definitely a must for the sheer "what the fuck?" factor alone. The whole thing is pretty well-accomplished, although I doubt anyone will mistake TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION for THE KINGSTON TRIO any time soon. Highlight of this section has to be the weirdo avant-jazz take on "Nihilism, Emptiness, Nothingness, Nonsense" — somewhere, Miles and Ken Nordine are smiling (at least till they hear the first part of the CD).

The CD also includes ten live video tracks, playable on a Quicktime-enabled computer, and apparently recorded at a gig in someone's house. Sound quality is as bad as you'd expect, but the proceedings are still pretty damn entertaining. And how can you hate a band that delivers a song title like "Seth Putnam Was Wrong About a Lot of Things, But Seth Putnam Was Right About You"? If you get that joke, you're pretty much guaranteed to love TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION, or at least have some idea what they're on about. The rest of the world won't know or care, but it's pretty likely the band would have it no other way.