While many bands claim to be pissed off with the world around them, few manage to convey that emotion into much more than a slightly gruffer voice.
But there’s no such faux aggression from Oslo’s Grinding Fortune as they unload slab after slab of nasty, spiteful frustration in their 24-minute runtime. The songs are short and just as sharp, with all logic and decency thrown out the window.
Itch Relief’s mathy noise leans as much to jazz as it does to sludge, its chugging, fuzzed-up riffs and spasmodic drums ricocheting around the music while Daniel Ruud Lynnebakke’s stretched screams bulldoze on through. The lyrics come from a place of depravity and desolation, sneered through layers of sarcasm and bitterness (‘We are entertainers, do you feel entertained?’). In any other context some of the lyrics would be laughably macho but, tied to the emotive destruction of the Norse noisemakers, there’s levity among the melancholy. Connect this to the band’s refusal to pause for breath and Itch Relief is pure audible destruction.
