Coroner

Grin (1993)

Grin is the completion of Coroner's transformation from a technical Thrash Metal band to style that can be vaguely referred to as 'post-Thrash.' By this stage all remnants of Coroner's previous brand of technical Thrash Metal are gone. There are some mid-tempo Thrash/Groove riffs present here, but the outlandish virtuosity has been stripped back and replacing it are riffs that appear simple on first pass. A casual surface listen could tempt one into thinking that this is dumbed-down music without much substance outside of pointless rage, in fact I have seen people describe this as "Nu Metal." However this could be further from the truth.

Grin could be described, amongst many other things, as an act of deception.  Beneath the rage and anger that simmers on the surface is a great depth. It is elusive, hiding its secrets within mazes of strange time-signatures, unusual chord selections etc. The music alternates between sections that are full of extroverted anger and others that are that are slower, drenched in reverb and more introspective or akin to dream states. Make no mistake, these still virtuoso musicians, but rather than expanding the limits of their outward showmanship they have expanded the language that they use to write their music. By this stage of their career Coroner had become adept at creating sequences within their music that appear to be building with anticipation and suspense, only to wither out into nothingness. It is a cruel trick, but sometimes in life not all questions can have answers.

As such there is a kind of jagged abruptness to Coroner's song-writing on here, a kind of anti-flow if you will. If anything it is symbolically more equivalent to a Mental Vortex than the album of the same name. To achieve this Coroner deploy a very loose verse/chorus structure with the chorus ideas mainly serving as 'way-points' along the way. The rest of the music orbits around this as a central theme, but wanders and drifts through the surrounding spaces. Rather than aimlessness or complete void of meaning, this loose framework creates an environment where Coroner can create meditations on anger, dream-like sequences, paranoid episodes etc. It sinks its teeth into your skin and spreads itself like a virus, inducing a trance-like state. The music has an isolated, alien feel which is encouraged by the use of overdubbed sound-bytes like sirens, machinery, eerie radio transmissions, voice clips and interludes including brief spurts of tribal drumming, a didgeridoo soaked in reverb, static/distorted sounds etc.).

The guitar tone whilst still having that metallic edge, is a bit more refined and has a fair bit of reverb, which makes a real difference in the dreamy or aloof sounding parts of the music. The drumming is exceptional, it provides a steady, pulsing beat that fits perfectly with the meditative, dreamy/trance-like nature of the music. At times there are subtle little out of place timings to interrupt the tempo - adding to the abruptness lurking within the music. The bass itself shifts in and out of the forefront of the music,  there are parts where it carries the main melody and others where it slides in behind the guitars and pulses away with the drums. 

Whilst I would not go as far as saying it reaches the suggestive levels of surrealism as say a David Lynch movie, there are brief moments on here that feel like a parallel world is seeping through the cracks, interrupting the status quo.