Well, spring has officially sprung and so has my depression. Annually, the dark despondent days of winter leave me in the deepest of dour dispositions, and now it seems as if spring won't be any sort of a reprieve. Did you now that suicide rates spike in the spring? Suicide numbers double and even triple in the spring when compared to winter. The facts seemingly subverting expectations of the assumed popular opinion that the winter weather and the holidays increase depression. Summer doesn't seem to fair much better than spring, either. Links to summertime depression and suicide are attributed to—of all things—pollen count and FOMO. I once heard summer referred to as the "mean season" due to the increase in homicides and other violent crimes during the season. I guess the theory is that the heat combined with the more people out and about, the chances of potentially violent communal interactions increase.
Now, keep that "mean season" mentality in mind. Think about the violence and fermenting rage behind that solstitial colloquialism. Add to it that springtime allergen of melancholia. Now, enter Merked and their 2022 full-length, Merk-Mob. This twenty track album might as well be a physical manifestation of an especially indignant chip on the band's shoulder.
Oakland California's Merked can be unofficially viewed as the sister band to previously reviewed hardcore/powerviolence band, Choke. Bassist, Fedge, moonlights as bassist for both Choke and Merked, as well as being co-founder of both band's label, Enemy Of The Goat Records. The man has a pick between his index finger and thumb and the other fingers dipped into a few different pies.
Merked formed in the tumultuous year of 2020 amongst the spirit breaking pandemic lockdowns and the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests spurred on by the unjustified murders at the hands of law enforcement. Merked was forged in the midst of all that drama and I think the callousness and cynicism is embedded in the band's DNA.
In 2021 Merked released their debut self-titled full-length cassette that played like a crust punk/hardcore shaped peg shoved into a grindcore/powerviolence shaped hole. Merked's lyrical content read like a series of angry notes that were stuck under the windshield wiper on the car of that neighbor you absolutely hate. The band takes issue with the most tedious aspects of the human condition—mostly about how people should take accountability for their actions, how people themselves get in their own way and pulling yourself up by your boot straps. A very conventional hardcore style of unsympathetic positivity and perseverance. 2022's Merk-Mob finds the band in very similar waters.
Merk-Mob is the band's second full-length and is much in line with their previous works. Although, the band's crustier aspects have given way to plodding sludge, they still stay true to that hardcore and grind-violence mixture that was established as the heart of the band. The heavy sludging trudges are probably what you'll notice first about Merk-Mob. Right away the band stomps into the album with some thick and nasty headbanging dirge riffs. Merked is tossing around a lot of weight for a grind-violence band. The mix of the CD is geared towards a low bottom end, which is only accentuated by a high production value. Finally! A band that utilizes the bass guitar and places it prominently in the mix. The bass guitar adds a real depth and texture that is lacking in a lot of records in the genre. It allows for not only a heavy sound, but a tonal thoroughness.
With the combination of the slurry guitar riffs, the bouncing and coiled basslines, the crashing drums and the band's high exploitation of syncopation, Merked's version of sludge-violence is aggressive and coherent. It reminds me of those work safety videos where a machinist gets an arm yanked off in a spinning motor and the asymmetrically weighted appendage revolves around in systematic thwacks against the hard metal.
Things aren't all bass filled slogs, though. The band blasts their grindcore sensibilities just as much. Songs like "Landmine In The Mind", "Ongoing" and "Payback", among others, wear their grindcore influences more on their sleeves. Some blast beats might only be a split second flick of the wrist every other measure, but the heavy pounding of the drums are just as effective when blasting as the are setting a rhythmic drone. Most songs tend to drop in and out of the grindcore and sludge genres pretty effortlessly. Thirty percent of the songs are under a minute and some forty-five percent of the songs are under thirty seconds, so the band is never bogging the listener down on one side or another. Song compositions tend to rise and fall and deconstruct themselves marking Merked with an almost trademark off-kilter, loose style of powerviolence.
Another of Merked's purely grindcore traits is in the harshness of their vocals. The gravelly, guttural crust roars are repurposed into powerviolence barks and then add to that a smearing of screeching high vocals behind it all for, again, a sound that bears a lot of weight in the band's heavy-askew grind-violence.
Lyrically, the band is still not beating around the bush with their messages of distain for people's lack of awareness, both intellectually and morally. While not mincing words, the band is certainly nixing a few of them. The song lyrics on Merk-Mob might only be a single sentence long hate-filled haiku that is straight to the point. And maybe "hate" is not the right word. It's more of a vivid annoyance or lack of patience for the aforementioned human follies. One song that doesn't need lyrics to get the band's views across is track six, "Soothing Sounds Of Slaughtered Rapists"; rather, the liner notes merely state that:"Merked approves and encourages the torturing and killing of all rapists." The song itself is a slow instrumental with audio samples from cinema of agonizing screams and squelches. Most of the album is layered with sound clips ranging from Hellraiser to The Office to just the sound of incessant gunfire. That alone should fairly denote the level of cynicism on Merk-Mob.
Merk-Mob is a amazing sounding record that is deceptively heavy and excellently produced for a grind-violence CD. The detuned, bass centric tone pairs real nice with the extreme contrast in tempos. In my opinion there is a big Dystopia vibe that makes me think that Merked might break into "Backstabber" at any moment. Obviously Merked's influences of crust, sludge, hardcore and grind have songs brimming with unpredictability—snarled-faced, head nodding sludge riffs that can give way to blast beat chaos before taking a right turn into bouncing hardcore beatdowns. With almost three-quarters of the album being under a minute, cramming in all those genres is an art. I'd recommend picking up a physical copy of the CD to get the full depth of the band's low production, in addition to a twenty-first track that features a recording of a live set from the band that doesn't sound too bad itself, as far as production goes. Merked hooks it up real nice for powerviolence punks who are now of a certain age where crowd killing is as dumb as it looks, "punk time" shows are truly just inconvenient and scene toxicity is no longer acceptable.
FFO: Dystopia, Choke, Mindcollapse, Iron Lung, Weekend Nachos
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