‘Winter rains begin, Ground turns to mud, Invokes hatred, Delights of cruelty, Bitterness of alienage’ (Violent Winter)

This is hardcore done ugly.  Don’t be thrown by the darkly evocative artwork and the band name.  Early Grave unashamedly draw on the traditions of tense, fraught 1980s’ US Midwest hardcore and take them somewhere even bleaker.  Think, perhaps, Mecht Mensch melding with the more contemporary expressions of Memory Ward and Permission and you’ll be heading in the right direction.

Violent Winter is the Philadelphia trio’s debut album, following on from last year’s demo, and its fifteen tracks hurtle by with a breathless malevolence.  The tautly lean guitar and the frantically manic rhythm section combine to ferment a densely claustrophobic atmosphere.  It seems to cling to your very skin as the gutturally spewed vocals plunge us into a world of deep-seated decay and apocalyptic horror.

The pace is unrelenting, yet it is underpinned by an intricacy and nimble complexity that ensures that the battery proves anything but monochrome.  There is also a playfulness at work that is never too far from the surface, which adds further texture.  Fleeting flares of melody and a well disguised rhythmic bounce are studded with wholly unexpected ‘woahs’, gang vocal chants, and even a medieval acoustic intro to the final track, Fear Liath.  The frenetic Rawhead, the seething title track, and the abrasively bristling Black Easter perfectly capture the sense of unremitting dread.