Historically, grindcore isn't a genre whose fan base has typically been very open to experimentation. You're allowed to sing about gore or societal breakdown, you shouldn't do anything too flashy musically, and your songs should be about a minute long. If you aren't descended from either Carcass's Reek of Putrefaction or Napalm Death's Scum, you probably aren't grind. "Progressive" tends to describe bands' politics - not their sound. Liberteer, the one-man project of Cretin's Matthew Widener, has managed to release an album that turns all this conventional wisdom on its head while still potentially appealing to the most hardened of grindcore traditionalist.
Better to Die on Your Feet Than Live on Your Knees, despite its painfully on-the-nose title, is a furiously anarchic slab of Scum-vintage grind that, oh yeah, includes marches played on horn and banjo. This is the album that William Wallace would play as he rode into battle if William Wallace were riding into battle at Occupy Wall Street. In addition to the folk instrumentation, Widener mixes things up with huge melodic guitar leads that wouldn't feel out of place on a power metal album. This is dangerous territory for any practitioner of grindcore - even Pig Destroyer got put through the proverbial ringer for putting thrash parts on Terrifyer and Phantom Limb - but Better to Die keeps the intensity level so high that it's hard to imagine well-reasoned dissent.
It helps that only two of the album's 17 tracks clock in at more than two minutes - and that the lyrics are consistently bent on dismantling the government. Widener wears his anarchist leanings on his sleeve in songs like "Class War Never Meant More Than It Does Now" and "It Is the Secret Curse of Power That It Becomes Fatal." One needn't have to be swept up in the mythology of the recurring musical themes or the appearance of bugle solos to appreciate the record, and that's part of why it works. Strip away all the stuff that isn't subservient to cardinal grindcore law and you'd still have a ripping album.
What you wouldn't have, though, is a masterpiece, and Widener's flair for rule-breaking makes the inaugural Liberteer album an undisputed one. Despite its potential to unite, it's entirely probable that it will divide. And that's okay. Anarchy was never supposed to be agreeable.
Post by Brad Sanders
