Buckshot Facelift – Ulcer Island (Review)

Buckshot Facelift are a grindcore band from the US and this is their fourth album.

Here we have over 40 minutes of well-written deathgrind. The band take the brief, energetic bursts of punk and grindcore, and entwine them with the staying power of death metal, making for an album that exists on both worlds.

This is a surprisingly diverse collection of tracks too, with various speeds, moods and themes running across the playing time. The band are not adverse to mixing the various tempos up, with everything from frenetic blast beats to lumbering doom finding a home at various points across the album.

It’s not just the speeds that give this album a riot of textures either, it’s the various riffs that the band use too. Guitar leads and solos are also occasionally used to add further colour to the distorted assault.

Equally at home playing pure punk or death metal, it’s when they combine these that the magic really happens. There’s elements of modern violent hardcore, d-beat, sludge metal, and outright colossal doom on here as well.

It’s a lot to take in, and forms an unholy mess of brutal carnage. It all adds up to a great collection of songs.

The vocals are many and various, all brutal and savage. As diverse and well-performed as the music, the main singer and his backing gang slaughter the opposition with the hungry abandon of wild animals.

So, within the confines of the above genres and styles; for any given track on this release you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. Each one has its own charms and the band’s ability to provide a plethora of different types of grind-infused extremity across the songs is a joy to experience.

Ulcer Island is a death/grind/other release with a lot more to offer fans of extreme metal than merely faceless violence. Buckshot Facelift have personality, character, and a wide-array of methods to put you down.

A devastating mix of Discordance Axis, The Red Chord, Fuck the Facts, Circle of Dead Children, Pig Destroyer and Cripple Bastards.

Don’t miss out on this one.