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I'm very selective when it comes to grindcore music. When bands push the already-extreme style of music to the limits, I typically lose interest in what cracks and crumbles into painful noise. Fortunately, there are bands, such as Pig Destroyer and Cephalic Carnage, that are able to fuse the overarching chaos and mayhem of grindcore with much more accessible metallic, thrash and hardcore influences.
While maintaining a vision of destruction, Antigama writes grindcore with enough variation to keep me interested and returning for subsequent listens. Ridden with blastbeats, garbled and incomprehensible screams, groaning bass and sinister, down-tuned guitar riffs, Discomfort has an excess of the familiar facets of grindcore. Certainly such overbearingly extreme and in-your-face attributes will put the faint of heart off before they give Discomfort a fair chance. But for those who wait and listen, Antigama regularly varies their sound. There are all sorts of mammoth grooves, which are much easier to nod along to, straightforward chord progressions and a wide enough vocal range to keep things from getting anywhere near repetitive.
Discomfort also has the benefit of strong production. When the music approaches pure chaos, the sound gets mildly jumbled, but the recording is notably solid for the genre. The snare drum is usually audible during the blastbeats, the vocals have a nice, textured distortion, the bass is pronounced, and the guitar riffs and dissonant chords hit with ample crunch and clarity. The way the record sounds emphasizes the tight playing.
I'm into Discomfort. It never fully lets up on the aggression, but Antigama knows when to switch things up and keep the music engrossing. While I'll likely always be on the fence with this sort of music, bands like Antigama offer enough technical skill and energy to at least make me lean to the "I like grindcore" side.
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