It’s Monday and Mondays suck, so let’s grind it out with XHostageX’s Relentless Persecution.
Today we give thanks to the gods for the temperature finally dropping and hopefully tapering off for the foreseeable future. And not only that but also being grateful that I can finally return to a sense of normality with this column. Whereas now when I don’t deliver on a Monday, it’s not because I’m busy programming, it is because I’m lazy and I don’t feel like it (and it is probably Sunday at 11 pm and I’m probably falling asleep on the couch). And with this return, I wanted to delve into a past release with today’s feature.
Let’s go back to 2012 for this release. There is always a ton of good grind in the backlog and XHostageX is one of those ass-kickers of a band. The two-piece of Yong-Sung (Merked, Thousandswilldie) and Greggdeadface (also Thousandswilldie, Your Enemy) have been grinding for a while. Though the project has not released anything since 2018, what they have is a solid foundation of grindviolence.
Relentless persecution is 15 tracks done in 7 minutes, with only about half the songs crossing the 30 second mark. As it goes, noise not music. And noisy XHostageX is. From the opener “Remembered As Nothing” through the closer “Comforting Darkness” the band is pure punked-out noisy grind through and through. The tracks blaze and blast by like a damn whirlwind, with feedback tying together many of the tracks.
The album actually ties together plenty of elements of grind and powerviolence. Though more focused on the grind aspect of things, there are tracks like “Grim Fucking Reality” that lean more in the powerviolence direction. Something a little more for fist swinging. The following track “Lonesome Reality” also has a taste of this. At plenty of places throughout there are straight hardcore-punk breakdowns.
Some bands, perhaps most notably Sex Prisoner and SixBrewBantha, are big on often or never-repeating riffs. This kind of writing makes the album feel even more nuts because the structure is all over the place. XHostageX does this a ton throughout. A rhythm gets moving, the band switches it up and never looks back. It is some of the most breakneck writing any grind or powerviolence band can do.
As I said, there is always a ton of backlog grind/powerviolence just waiting to be discovered. Usually, I keep things in the present on here but XHostageX needs to get into more ears. Relentless Persecution is short and violent just like this type of grindcore should be. And it is the hefty kick in the ass we all need on a Monday. Get grinding on this!
