What can you get for a dollar anymore these days? Well, you could get a fucking idiot hamburger from a multi-national corporation that is destroying the health and environment the world over like the fecund trash-hole consumer dirtbag you are, or you could get a digital copy of this fantastic jet-fueled deathgrind album from Violent Opposition. ‘Utopia/Dystopia’ has the hyper speed shakes and have developed from a hardcore punk/grindcore group with powerviolence tendencies into a world class deathgrind band over the course of just a handful of years. Jazzy technical death metal influences explode across longer-than-usual compositions and are made doubly violent with the new approach to vocals that now includes a Barney Greenway style shout.

‘Utopia/Dystopia’ has the hammered precision and speed of bands like Terrorizer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed through the hyper, technical and needled out shredding of Crowpath and Circle of Dead Children. They must have been jamming ‘Bestial Machinery’ when they conceived their sound, which is more or less grindcore at the click of your average technical death metal band. The energy of the riff variations is infectious and the classic grind influences in their sound put this band up there with groups like Antigama and Napalm Death for me.

I had a similar reaction to Cephalic Carnage back in 2005 when ‘Anomalies’ came out, having not really heard a band use brutal death metal trends as a jumping off point for thier otherwise orthodox influenced grindcore. Though it isn’t all about the death metal influences here, as I also like the more hardcore influenced vocal of their previous album ‘Courage and Conviction’. They could easily jump between the death/grind vocals and the previous style and make an even more diverse statement. But hey, grind is typically the shortest and most succinctly driven music out there and ‘Utopia/Dystopia’ bashes out an incredible album with admirable brevity. Violent Opposition might not be exactly as avant-cerebral as Gridlink or !T.O.O.H.! but their music carries an incomparable urgency and brilliantly brutal high-speed execution.

Brains? Brains! 3.5/5.0

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