Album/EP

MUNT - Pain Ouroboros (EP Review)

Walladmin

Heavy Metal Wordsmith

Mar 16, 2023

7 min read

MUNT - Pain Ouroboros
Released: March 3rd, 2023

Line Up

David 'Spud' Robertson // GUITAR & VOCALS
Sol Laskowski // GUITAR & VOCALS
Tim 'Mothlord' Richmond // VOCALS
Ronnie Dixon // BASS
Jared Roberts // DRUMS

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Melbourne band MUNT have re-emerged with a new EP of blackened grindcore. A fair bit has changed since their last EP in 2019, with weeks and months of isolation through pandemic lockdowns. The band have channeled that energy into Pain Ouroboros, a brisk 15 minutes of extreme metal that combines sub-genres to create something unholy and with few limits.

Opener ‘Children of Delirium’ is your entry point, with Tim ‘Mothlord’ Richmond’s gravelly bark kicking off the absurdly fast blast beats with new guy Jared Roberts lightening feet. The first half is almost straight black metal, thundering and bleak, before slowing slightly into a hardcore d-beat and riff. The final 40 seconds or so slows it down to a doom sludge. It’s a cool coda that gives ‘The Vengeful March’ some room to pick up the tempo again and kick some serious arse. It’s ferocious and uncompromising, a song designed to collapse vertebrae and smash skulls. The breakdown is utterly magnificent, an oasis of hardcore among the blackened sea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmqycQo3X5U

The aural abuse continues on ‘Zero Sum’, a thunderous takedown of society that barely has time to sink in before it ends its berserker rage. ‘Communion of Thorns’ is more controlled. Laskowski and Robertson get technical on their riffs and it’s a taste of djent heaven for tech-death purists that soon delves into a murky doom atmosphere before unleashing the cacophony of hate again. It’s got a long elongated outro of various squeaks and squeals that leads into the final tune:

‘Apostate Sermon’. Again it combines the blackest of black with a more nuanced-core approach to the drums. It’s disorientating at first but by the end of the EP feels like a natural way to express one’s frustrations by being as nihilistic and damn heavy as possible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFU0ng8F5Io

There’s no compromise at any stage of Pain Ouroboros, a fitting title as the blackened bile is regurgitated each song. The banner of extreme metal is a broad one to gather under but MUNT succeed on EP number two by committing to their principles and seeing what combinations of stuff they like can do in the same song. I suppose there is a chance it would become a grind across a full album but as an EP it is pretty hard to find fault with. This is a band with a mission and the musical prowess to pull it off.