The drill that Helsinki, Finland-based bestial death/grindcore duo CONCRETE WINDS press upon the skull doesn’t crack away at its violence for the sake of freeing the mind but instead attempts to destroy it, liquifying all thought on this third and defining full-length album. If you can keep up with ‘Concrete Winds‘ and follow along with their rampage, finding joy in the hand-over-fist crafted violence available here you might be exactly the sort of reckless animal they’ve channeled throughout. A classicist hand pushing itself toward maniac abandon with just enough control to provide structure to its own chaotic result, this record captures these folks’ efforts to distinguish and evolve their mutant beast-grinding wares into formidable (true) extremes void of cheap gimmickry.

Concrete Winds formed between bassist, vocalist and guitarist P.J. (Degial) and drummer Mikko both of whom spent 2006-2018 pouring their blood into the unholy death magick of Vorum a feat of madness that’d produced on of the absolute best albums of 2013 but hadn’t produced much more than a monstrosity of an after that eventually splitting up. Less than a year later the two had produced one of the most mind-melting, vein shredding releases of 2019 with their debut LP, ‘Primitive Force‘. I remember reviewing the album at the time and not being able to think while I listened to it. They weren’t just animals making bestial noise but songs like “Tyrant Pulse” carried this creeped and wild ear-worming sensation that’d helped their debut stick in mind. Their initial work was obviously seeking a path beyond their previous band and achieving something that was indisputably extreme where elements of thrash, grindcore, and bestial death metal which weren’t reduced down to bones but instead sped up to such clip that their machine gunned approach transcended any plainly peggable position. Fans of bands like Impure and Ascended Dead or even the superior riffcraft of Omegavortex could live within the maelstrom of that debut and it has held up just as well since.

Credit due to these two folks as they not only pushed the envelope to the point of psychotic fracture on their second LP (‘Nerve Butcherer‘, 2021) but they did so in terms of the render, a bolt of eye-and-ear burning electrocution that’d reprised the harried spasms of their debut and translated it into a caustic display of pain and discomfort. Concrete Winds kinda hit at the wrong time per my own experience at the time, right at the end of 2021 when my brains were scrambled and unable to fully process the album beyond inclusion on my best of the month without finding time for a full review beyond that point. Still, I did appreciate the record and returned to it in the months after. At that point they were becoming more commonly described as blackened grindcore, deathgrind and such but I still feel like the type of black/death metal they are playing was/is rooted in the late 80’s style of bestial death metal extremism that’d always inspired them and their exaggeration of it is their own, similar to how a band like Portal abstracted their own fixation on classic death metal. I guess the thing to wonder from the moment ‘Concrete Winds‘ was announced was whether or not they would try to out-gun past efforts or continue to morph those spasms into something else entirely.

One of my main compliments given to ‘Nerve Butcherer‘ pointed to the “slower” groovier sections they’d infused into their density not so much for giving the skull a break but just hitting on some heavier chunks within the fray and they’ve amped up this aspect to some degree on ‘Concrete Winds‘, paying closer attention to the flow of their attack and working in the bits and pieces of brilliance their debut had brought. Opener “Permanent Dissonance” kinda brings all of that at once with bullied-out blasts, swerving noise guitar mania, and frequent tempo crushing peaks that add to the overall pacing served here. Whereas you could feel the recoil building on their rapid fire previously here they’ve got both stocks under each pit and their aim doesn’t waiver as the bloody frenzied state builds. More importantly these pieces generally flow together, either by way of a simple downward cast pick scrape or a few snare hits to reset the moment. In this sense the grindcore (or, powerviolence even) level of throttle applied here makes sense.

Beyond their Angelcorpse-level of attack becoming more slick, mapped out but still opportunistic in its predation, we find two excellent additions to the Concrete Winds experience here which are evident from the get-up. The first is a refinement of their production values via engineering, mix and master from Lawrence Mackrory (+ drums engineered via Matti from Corpsessed) where the drums are given additional hammer and heft to the point where they only get meaner as the album progresses. “Subterranean Persuasion” brings in some industrial inspired boons and “Pounding Devotion” shakes things up on a deeper level at the end of the album and the root of these new additions is the serrated presence of the drums which now square up more reasonably against the noxious harass of their guitar work. The second addition is of course their longtime phantom member and live guitarist Mika Heinonen who you should recall as a member of now defunct but still well-loved Obscure Burial. The guitarist contributes notable lead guitar work to three songs on this album and brings some extra layers of mania to two of the best songs on the album for my own taste, “Infernal Repeater” and “Demented Gospels”. I dunno, these guys could have just made ‘Nerve Butcherer‘ part two and I’d still have been stoked but it feels like they’ve found a way to push the boundaries of their work and cram in unique points of jet black nox into this self-titled record which further define their own sound.

For the first five or so listens the blur of ‘Concrete Winds‘ was both familiar and equally as much of a thrill as past efforts, landing just as decisive and crazed enough that it represents Concrete Winds perfectly as a force and a phenomenon in underground malevolence. By the tenth or so listen the nuance of this thing had been more-or-less unveiled, I mean keep in mind this whole deal is ~25 minutes long, where its use of brain-scrambling leads and fully mutated dual rhythmic ‘Blessed are the Sick‘-isms and industrial smoke became even more pronounced as the leading point of fusion. Within that brief runtime we get a short checklist of big moments you’d want from the band satisfied but this isn’t really the point it seems as they are clearly searching for new dimensions of sound here and songs like “Hell Trance” and the gamut they wheel through do well to emphasize how broad their thinking goes beyond bash, riff and noodle even if it could all be reduced about that much by the average passerby.

Stamped, burnt and sandpaper-fed… the entirety of Concrete Winds presentation here might scrub the skull clean of its gore like a belt sander but it is always clear that the dementia here is served by human brains elevated to a machine-like standard. It’d make more sense to describe their work here as inhumane rather than organic but in terms of the eldest ways of death metal finding a new angle upon extremity that is visceral, exciting and morbid to the point of psychic genocide these guys have a leg-up on much of what passes for “extreme” music today. Only the most fucked up animals attuned to bestial and grinding venom with some manner of classicist precision intact will appreciate the spasmodic horrors within. A very high recommendation.

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