It’s Monday and Mondays suck, so let’s grind it out with some new Neon Hiss from the upcoming full-length Shame.
A quick disclaimer that this is not the unveiling of the full record. That will drop when it drops. But welcome back to the Monday Grind. Things should be in regular full swing from here on out. Meaning that I will post the column when I feel like it but with more regularity. I plan on doing a bigger one in the future that features a whole bunch of releases as opposed to focusing on single bands, which is the general format. Alright, let’s get on into it.
Toronto, Ontario’s Neon Hiss is a one-person project that features a revolving door of guest vocalists. Those that have read this column for a while now should know who this band is. A.C. (Holy Grinder, Deprivation Tactics, ex-Goth Girl, amongst other projects) has punched out four demos and two compilation tracks under the cybergrind moniker and is gearing up to release the project’s first full-length Shame. Joining them as the album’s vocalist is another Monday Grind project you might be familiar with: CHOPx7, another one-person cybergrind project. And with a line-up like this, well, they ain’t kitten around.
So far, Neon Hiss has given us two tracks: “Bio-weapon” and “Flesh 2021.” Combined both tracks total two minutes. “Bio-weapon” kicks things off sounding real gnarly. I think in a previous article about the band I said they sounded like Frontierer gone cybergrind and it is still the case. The guitar sounds real gnarly and loose, like the strings are just flopping there as CHOPx7 screams over the wavy distortion. As the track moves along, the intensity kicks up, things start blasting and finish on a fever pitch.
“Flesh 2021” kicks in on full-scale intensity. The raw screaming over the programmed drums and the panicked guitar playing give in to the kind of urgency that mathcore often produces. The track builds, breaks, builds, breaks, and then moves into a kinda groovy blast that also builds and breaks. However, the last quarter of the track is where things really pick up steam and the track just grinds heads in.
This is a helluva start for Shame. Though we only have two tracks as a jumping-off point I think we have a promising start. But be on the lookout for more. Cybergrind is starting to come up as a genre, and it has a lot of weirdness and experimentation to offer if that is your thing. Who knows what surprises Shame will contain? But I bet it will be more noisy cybergrind.
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