Clinging To The Trees Of A Forest Fire – Songs Of Ill Hope And Desperation

Clocking in at maybe a little over 30 minutes, the brand new full-length offering from Denver, Colorado’s sludge-infused grind quartet known simply as Clinging To The Trees Of A Forest Fire is just as extreme in style and sound as the band’s name is in length. Songs of Ill Hope and Desperation (Prosthetic) rarely stops for breath in its pedal-to-the-floor display of crusty and somewhat blackened grindcore insanity.

From the record’s opener, “Teeth and Hair”, to later tracks like “Shat Out My Bones”, “Bouquet of Self Pity” and “Leather Hands”, the pacing is pretty much an in-your-face mixture of distorted sludge and abrasive blasts and grind assaults. Only on rare occasions do slower, more delicate riffs show their gnarled faces and the hoarse-throated, shrieking vocals are exactly what one should hope to hear when putting on a record like Songs of Ill Hope…The only real time the gears change, is in the record’s final number, “Remove the Light” which features eerie voices engaged in some sort of chant accompanied by a baby’s relentless cries and droning, dissonant guitar at around the mid-way point, only to later explode one last time before its abrupt conclusion.

Clinging To The Trees Of A Forest Fire is a band that clearly knows what they’re doing. This being their third full-length, they have definitely succeeded in creating a genuinely unsettling, bone-jarring record that sinks its teeth in from the start and never grows old in its ferocity. It is the kind of crushing grind intensity that fans of Napalm Death, and fellow Denver grinders Gaza alike, will embrace with open arms and banging heads. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up!