Unsilent Death

This is the first album by the Californian trio built around Todd Jones on vocals and guitar, with John Gianelli on bass and Taylor Young on drums. Kurt Ballou of Converge engineered and mixed it, Alan Douches mastered it and Billy Benson made the cover. Ten songs run to under fourteen minutes. An average of about eighty seconds a song is itself the argument: from the opening "Conform" through to "Depths", most of these tracks begin and stop without an introduction or an ending. The material is grindcore and hardcore punk with a thick coat of Swedish death metal distortion over it, and what carries is not only the speed but the weight of the moments that drop to mid tempo. Only the closing "Depths" passes three minutes, and against everything before it that feels enormous. Sources disagree about who put it out. Some give Streetcleaner Records and Six Feet Under Records in March 2010, others Southern Lord (LORD127), and the Southern Lord pressing is the one that circulated. A tenth anniversary edition followed on 27 November 2020, adding the three songs from the Obscene Humanity 7-inch and two tracks from these sessions that had not been heard.