Gothenburg, Sweden has long been fertile breeding ground for the forgotten edges of musical extremes.  AT THE GATES, DARK TRANQUILITY and IN FLAMES, to name a few, have arisen from the industrial streets of this Swedish port town, and now you can throw grindcore maniacs WALKING CORPSE into the mix.  “Our Hands, Your Throat” is the band’s second foray into global annihilation, a thirty-five minute slab of relentless violence spread out over eleven short, concise and pummeling songs.  The whole grindcore/deathcore sub-genre of metal is pretty much the equivalent of keeping a rabid wolverine trapped in a cage the size of a beer cooler, just bursting at the bars to escape, teeth-snarling as drool drips endlessly from his blood-infused snout. If let loose, the whole thing threatens to fall apart; as long as he’s held in captivity, however, that anger for freedom just builds and builds until a physical explosion seems imminent. In other words, “Our Hands, Your Throat” is like that.

Opener “Dreamflesh Navigator” is one of four songs that clocks in under the two-minute mark, a relentless barrage of double-bass drums, dissonant math-y grind riffs, and the animalistic growls of Henrik Blomqvist echoing the controlled chaos of the music. Along with the penultimate song, “Forever Sleep,” the short, compact nature of the song is like a gunshot to the head at point-blank: it’s about the aftershock, the blood and brains dripping down the wall, footprints left in the viscera covering the concrete floor.  It’s aggressive, impossibly ugly stuff and if you aren’t partial to the inhumanity that defines grindcore, it can be brutally hard to access.  But that’s fine by WALKING CORPSE.  They’re not here to entertain; they’re here to rip your head of it’s fucking neck.

The album is filled with intricate, nasty licks and some of Fredrik Rojas’s sweeps and leads are ludicrously impressive.  While the relentless attack of the music borders on the edge of aural fatigue, the band does dabble with the dynamics at points.  Single “The Wheel” starts off with a groove-oriented attack, Magnus Dhalin’s snare ringing out like the wheel of an earth mover, before collapsing into the grindiest of grindcore riffs and back again. After about three minutes, the song hits the sludge, the riff slowed down to a plodding, blood-ridden slog through the mud. “Falling Through A World of Wounds” follows a similar template, a smog-filled breath into blackened lungs, the riffage plowing through the clogged trachea of humanity.

In terms of grindcore, WALKING CORPSE is putting themselves up there with BRUTAL TRUTH, NAILS and CONVERGE and this is high praise.  Like most albums in the genre, it’s hard to discern one moment from the next as it’s like getting the shit pummeled out of you for thirty minutes.  By the time you take the headphones off, it’s hard to see straight anymore, much less make sense out of the stupid world around you.  But grindcore is about that: chopping through the sludge of emotions to get at the visceral core of humanity.  A collection of atoms that form what should be some sort of sentient being doesn’t mean that sentient being needs to be worth saving.  WALKING CORPSE is the soundtrack for a world in which a collection of atoms is just that: a giant pile of shit.