Review by Carl on May 10, 2025.

And the goregrind train has pulled into the station once again. This time it's coming from Brazil, and bringing with it the, at the time of writing, most recent offering by Harmony Fault, so let's have a gander at what that is all about.

The semi-acoustic intro might perhaps deceive you at first, but the intent is made very clear not long into proceedings, when the guitars and vocals commence roaring soon enough. Harmony Fault play a type of gore-drenched grindcore with thick strains of death metal running through it, here and there reminding me of bands such as Impaled, Regurgitate and Impetigo. The music moves forward at a primarily midtempo pace, alternated with some necessary blastbeat-driven velocity spliced in, and with a lot of attention being given to the fat guitar tone. The use of pitched roarings with more scream-y vocals works very well, and combined together with the chainsaw guitars, sets the tone for a big part of the band's overall sound. Harmony Fault relies for the most part on stomping groove to make their music move ahead, while making good use of short guitar leads to break up some of the monotony that this kind of midtempo pace can bring with it. There are some solid ideas going on here, take the build up halfway through "Mutilated Beyond Recognition" or the Godflesh-y bass/percussion start to "Lipstick, Dildos and Body Bags", adding some necessary anchor points to the music, and that is no bad thing, because despite the solidly roaring guitars and bass the music does tend to get kinda same-y at times.

And that's not the only criticism to be had, unfortunately. I'm speaking for myself here, but I really wouldn't have minded a lot more wide-eyed bonkers blastbeat velocity on this album. The midtempo parts keep the music flowing forward alright, but there's also something lacking here. Things never really fly off the rails in that demented grindcore way I love to hear happening on an album of this kind. Everything just stays too controlled, too clean and too nice, even with the monstrous sounding vocals and guitars roaring all over it. The clicky-clacky digital sounding percussion does not help with this either, by the way.

I'm not going to call this a bad album in any way, it has just too much good stuff going for it to go that route. Again, the guitars sound massive, the interaction between the two different vocal styles is great, and the band has a decent amount of good ideas going for it, but everything has this way-too-controlled vibe hanging over it, stifling the musical flow significantly. Because of the predominantly midtempo delivery, it can get pretty monotonous too as well, which doesn't help proceedings all that much either. This is certainly no stinker, but I do have the feeling there could've been more in the can.

Rating: 7 out of 10