Grindcore

Grindcore, often shortened to Grind, is a genre of extreme music that developed in the mid-1980's. It draws on the heaviest and most abrasive of music styles, including Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Hardcore Punk, Industrial Music and Noise Music. Grindcore bands are commonly made up of a simple vocalist, guitarist, bassist, drummer line-up. Grindcore songs are typically short, rarely lasting more than 2 to 2 and a 1/2 minutes long, with many lasting only seconds. Guitars are downtuned, heavily distorted and usually only played with simple, short, repetitive riffs, or without any consistent riffs at all, sometimes being completely improvised and played randomly up and down the neck. Bass playing is for the most part the same. Drumming is chaotic, sometimes deliberately out of time, and characterised by the use of blastbeats (look it up). Vocals are usually screamed, growled or barked, but unlike distinct vocal styles from other genres such as Deathgrowl and Screamo, which are still quite abrasive and sometimes inhuman-sounding but intended to convey some understandable meaning, Grindcore vocals are often completely unintelligible, with no audible distinction between vowels and consonants, syllables, and even whole words, with some of the more extreme vocalists performing several lines in one long scream, with no syllabilic definition and only slight pitch shifts to indicate different words. The Birmingham, UK band Napalm Death, started in 1985/6, is widely accredited with being the first Grindcore band, and their debut album Scum is regarded by most as the first Grindcore album. Since then it has diversified into many subgenres, often defined by lyrical themes than musical differences, such as Goregrind, Pornogrind, and the electronic offshoot Electrogrind.