I usually try to provide at least a bit of respite from an onslaught of violent/extreme music reviews with some coverage of less abrasive or disturbing material (plus I’ve already written about another Audible Violence release this month, Augurio Drama’s The Noise Box), but not only are the wells pretty fuckin’ dry on that front, the ones on this front are overflowing with bounty—as long as you don’t mind some chunks of rotten flesh, pulled teeth, and a decidedly above-regulation concentration of blood floating around in your water. With A Life of Gore, Colorado artist Razorwire Handcuffs delivers a series of prime butcher cuts of loud, dirty, diseased harsh noise, not quite fully planting an ankle stump in the trashwater-puddle of gorenoise but not completely leaving it behind either. An introductory sample about a three-month-old child being eaten by rats is always an auspicious beginning, and the rest of “Picked Apart” doesn’t disappoint as an opener, releasing a spurting geyser of crunching, crushing distortion from the fetid mush beneath ruptured stomach lining. Later tracks provide enough variation to make the whole tape a well-paced and engaging listen, but not so much as to wrest the music as a whole from the sluggish throes of the decomp phase: “The Breaking Wheel” surges like the flailing limbs of an electrocuted corpse, “Hara Kiri” claws at eardrums with punishing high frequencies, and “Execution” roils in a muffled, deformed inferno. I’ve featured the digital cover because based on the photos I’ve seen, the physical cassette doesn’t have “Picked Apart,” which is disappointing.
Noise Not Music 