Pgh. Grind Terrorists Return!!

Circle of Dead Children.
The name itself caused anxiety, panic and pained expressions in my household before I even told my wife I proudly participated in, and survived, the foam baseball bat "murder your neighbors" incident, years ago, on our drive to Virginia Beach last week.
CODC played a show at the legendary, now defunct, Pittsburgh venue the Millvale Industrial Theater wherein they set up their gear, in a circle, in the middle of the room and let people whirl and windmill all around them while they unleashed their short, shrapnel bursts of deathgrind insanity.  I can't remember if it was the show they played with A.C. or with Cephalic Carnage.  This was definitely in 2001 around when The Genocide Machine came out.  At any rate just when I thought their set that night couldn't get any better or sicker in the funnest, devil-horns sense of that term, they produced a box full of foam wiffleball bats.  Joe Horvath, CODC's vocalist, distributed the bats and then instructed us all to "murder our neighbors."  The band erupted, then the room.  I'll never forget the site of writhing, frenzied mass of human beings swirling, swinging and pummeling each other at will while the band detonated and spewed out the perfect soundtrack to a brilliantly cathartic, blunt-force foamy bloodletting.  A.C. should have just went home early (but then I would have been denied the spectacle of Seth Putnam calling Shannon: "8,000th wave punk rock").

The new album, five years in the making, Psalm of the Grand Destroyer is more brutal than that scene in Pan's Labyrinth when the general bashes that poor dude's face in with a wine bottle. It's so heavy I can't lift my iPod anymore.  The production is just as clear and powerful as it should be without sacrificing any edge or rawness.  The drumming is great and I love the weirdly, chaotic way these songs are arranged.  But, of course, the vocals are what keep me coming back to this devastating album.
Insanely deep, creepy growls that switch to burly burning witch shrieks and back again, always at the perfect pressure point in the song.  I'm not even a huge fan of death metal style vocals, but there is something so pure, pissed-off and terrifying in Joe's vocals.
The man sounds like a swarm of locusts.  Serious.
You know your shit is so sick and so insanely over the top when you have to put disclaimers on your record that say: "No vocal processing nor inhales" (ala Chris Barnes on Tomb of the Mutilated) so people understand there is no electronic trickery involved.
But unlike Barnes, Horvath's lyrics are abstract, interesting and paranoically thought provoking on the page.  To give you a tiny hint of where he's coming from they are copy-written by "Pale Horse, Inc." (RIP Mr. Cooper).
Favorite tracks on Psalm of the Grand Destroyer:
Ursa Major (1998 Revisited)
Earth and Lye
Obsidian Flakes

The whole album is good.  Just don't play it around your elderly colleagues after you've drank a few espressos.
I'm so glad CODC is back!

More soon:
I do still watch wrestling sometimes.
Also...Is it possible that the new Darkthrone, in conjunction with RJD's passing, has earnestly made me want to listen to Power Metal??