Grin - A Scanner Darkly

GRIN - A Scanner Darkly (Self released demo CD 2016)

Damn, I’ve received this CD few months ago, but I completely forgot about it, so it was lying somewhere, waiting for a listen, but instead, it only got covered with dust. So, I do apologize the band for this delay. Grin is not a band, which I would know about before “A Scanner Darkly” arrived in the mail. The band was formed in 1996 already, released some demos back then, but later they split up and reformed in 2014. I have no idea what was Grin music like on the old recordings, but for “A Scanner Darkly” I will use the description from Metal Archives, which says “technical thrash / groove metal”, for lack of any better descriptions. I would also use progressive and a touch of death metal, as some death parts are here also and the music do has sometimes more progressive, sick sound to have even more diverse and untypical sound. Honestly, I don’t listen to such music often, so I dare not to make any comparisons of Grin to other bands, because I don’t know! Strapping Young Lad maybe??? Who knows? Meshuggah? Of course “Grin” was a title of Coroner LP, so maybe that can be another clue (but I never listened to Coroner, I never cared for this band, so… I don’t know!). Who cares. What counts is that “A Scanner Darkly” contains four tracks, but the music is not bad at all. There’s quite characteristic and specific riffage, the whole demo definitely has a lot of groove and I can only wish that the vocals were a bit better, as I don’t like their sound so much. They could have been more aggressive. Other than that, Grin came up with some good songs, interesting ideas and arrangements and it surely doesn’t hurt to give “A Scanner Darkly” a listen once a while. The music is easily listenable and quite memorable as well, it’s well played and recorded, so I did spend a good time when listening to it.

Final rate: 65/100