### Nashgul: El dia despues al fin de la humanidad

#### 18/01/10 || Habakuk

I just got home from a wasted weekend in the alps, I have more than ten CDs filled with the creme of death and grind lying on my desk begging to be listened to, I have to work tomorrow, and in comes this label-sent album at hand. Thank Flash Gordon, it’s grind. 26 minutes. Spanish. Sorry guys, but as fate wants it, this’ll have to hold up against the latest Phobia and Pig Destroyer that lie in front of me in order to catch my attention, otherwise it’ll be my last 26 minutes spent with Nashgul. To make things even worse for these Spaniards, my hard drive is approaching its god-given limit, hoping for shit to get deleted.

So, this is obviously end-of-days-themed to a certain extent, as the cover art, a little Latin knowledge and the movie samples that everyone has heard before (ok, half of them are in Spanish) give away readily. The end of days and grind, now that’s something nobody had ever come up with. Redeeming factors are the songs “Snake Plissken” and “Mad Max II”, though. I don’t wanna know the lyrics (Mad Max II is an instrumental, anyway), but I also believe that “El vengador toxico” translates to “The toxic avenger”, so it should be safe to assume these guys know a good movie from a bad one. Those are the kind of song titles I want to see on a grind any album, if possible alongside “The Mechanic”, “Diamond Ninja Force” and “Surf Nazis must die”.

Musically, what we’re dealing with here is not a total lack of respect for the law, but grind of the dirty, fast and particularly unsterile kind and executed in a pretty competent manner. The drummer has a faible (that’s French) for d-beats and knows how to play a decent blast beat, the guitars are punkish in execution but with a deep metal grounding in their sound and the bass is audible, thick, follows along nicely, likes children and doesn’t bark. Neither does the singer, but his deep vocals straight from the stomach at times get a bit too froggish for my tastes. Tolerable but not awesome. His raspy screams are pretty good, though.

Same goes for the production, although it could use some more punch and a sharper edge, as sometimes things just blur out a little bit – but well, it’s underground grind, so that’s forgiven, I guess. I’ve definitely heard worse, and when it get’s too low-fi, I’m normally out of the game, but this combines the low-fi attitude with a decent sound, so we’re all good. And as the longest song is 2:27 in length and all but another one don’t even pass the 2-minute mark, I’ll make this one short: the songwriting is fine. A few nice riffs stand out from the pack and “Planet Cancer” sounds like a 1:1 rip-off from some Insect Warfare EP, but there are definitely worse comparisons if you’re a grind band.

So, not too bad, eh? Yep, pretty much. Give these guys a small venue and a good crowd and I’m pretty sure they fucken rip. The only problem for your band when sounding a bit like Insect Warfare is that this has been done before – by Insect Warfare – and these guys pretty much nailed the concept to the last iota. Who’d have thought. And if you don’t quite live up to these standards, your only choice is to try harder. So, catch you next time. And I’m actually keeping this stuff on my drive that’s reaching its very own end of days. Just to reassure myself from time to time that grind in Spain is just like grind elsewhere.

- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Power it up
- Website: Nashgul MySpace
- Band
- Santi: vocals
- Hector: guitars
- Luis: bass
- Ivan: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. The day after the end of humanity
- 02. Hidrofobia
- 03. Predicadores de la muerte
- 04. Cremated remains
- 05. La Plaga
- 06. Olor a Napalm
- 07. Colonia de leprosos
- 08. Crematorio
- 09. Mad Max II
- 10. Snake Plissken
- 11. El dia de los muertos
- 12. Terrorist warhead
- 13. Invierno nuclear
- 14. Street trash
- 15. Disintegration in a flash of light
- 16. El vengador toxico
- 17. Planet Cancer
- 18. El horror oculto
- 19. El fin