Unsilent Death

Personnel: Todd Jones (vocals, guitar); Taylor Young (drums).
Audio Mixer: Kurt Ballou.
Recording information: 12/27/2009-01/02/2010.
Tempting as it was to review Nails' 15-minute sophomore "album," Unsilent Death, with only 15 words (too late!), it's difficult to mince superlatives when attempting to describe a potentially historical watershed for sheer speed, fury, and intensity. Recorded over two days and mixed by Converge man Kurt Ballou, Unsilent Death is basically too heavy for punk, too fast for hardcore, too nimble for grindcore, and certainly too ADD-concise for death metal. So let's keep it short, like the songs themselves: 30-second blasts like "Conform," "Your God," and "Scapegoat" come as close as the band desires to actual grindcore; the equally brief "Traitor" is half speedster, half breakdown, and along with the His Hero Is Gone-inspired "Scum Will Rise," comes spiked with feedback squeals; "No Servant" pretty much D-beats the sh*t out of Discharge; "Suffering Soul," "I Will Not Follow," and the unusually long title track's dirt-caked riffs calls to mind Entombed; while "Depths," the three-minute epic closing the album, wraps everything described above into an only slightly less compact sonic time bomb. In short: Unsilent Death is absolutely lethal stuff -- listen if you dare! ~ Eduardo Rivadavia