NASUM - Shift

24 songs
37:20 minutes
***** ****
Burning Heart

Bandpage

With their vocalist Mieszko Talarczyk missing in Thailand, the new year has started extremely bad for Nasum, which makes it also hard to start this review. So instead of delving in the vivid history of Sweden's most popular and also best grindcore band, we just have a look at their stunning new album Shift which has been released surprisingly on Burning Heart Records, who normally are more specialised on melodic punk.

But don't worry, Nasum have not become any softer. The production is still an absolute killer, and the 24 songs even make it to 37 minutes this time, which is probably about 10 minutes longer than your average grind album. I have heard people call Nasum progressive grind and old school grind, but neither one is appropriate. Their modern brand of grind core adheres strongly to the original properties of the genre, meaning even their longer tracks (those above two minutes) have plenty of blast speed moments, but they add enough foreign influences to make the listening experience worthwhile. The guitars are played much more virtuosic than on your generic genre album, and the vocals carry the necessary amount of hysteria without ever grating the nerves. Of course it's an extremely fast album, and thus certainly not ok for everyone's taste, but all those of you who think that grindcore is a thing of the past, just listen to Shift and you will see why so many people enjoy listening to Nasum.