Band:	Gridlink
Album:	Coronet Juniper
Style:	Technical grindcore
Release date:	September 15, 2023
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Silk Ash Cascade
02. Anhalter Bahnhof
03. Pitch Black Resolve
04. Nickel Grass Mosaic
05. Ocean Vertigo
06. Octave Serpent
07. Coronet Juniper
08. Zygomatic
09. Refrain
10. The Forgers Secade
11. Revenant Orchard

Gridlink left us in 2014 after hammering out Longhena, 23 minutes of the most technical and melodically sophisticated grindcore ever tracked. An unexpected reunion has yielded a fourth opportunity to bend the rules of one of music’s most chaotic evolutions, and boy does it ever bend.

In the years since Longhena touched down, the individual members of Gridlink have kept busy seeking ways to further perfect the grindcore genre: guitarist Takafumi Matsubara under his own name, vocalist Jon Chang with No One Knows What The Dead Think, and drummer Bryan Fajardo with P.L.F., all among other projects. All three musicians are worth investigating in their own right, and among them Matsubara’s “strange, beautiful and fast” reinterpretations of this high-speed noise concept hewed closest to Gridlink, making for some very unique and experimental grindcore. For this venture, Gridlink are also joined by bassist Mauro Cordoba of Maruta, another solid purveyor of ground-up aural fist-fighting. But Gridlink is still a different beast altogether from the above, and an irreplaceable one at that, and given that the band promised to pick up where Longhena left off, a bearing of optimism has surrounded speculation over what Coronet Juniper will do to a legion of eardrums still rusty from the long absence.

That promise proves entirely fulfilled. Coronet Juniper is slightly shorter than Longhena – three fewer songs, three fewer minutes – but it is even denser and more compositionally adventurous, an earnest continuation of the musical philosophy that Longhena articulated so singularly. What Coronet Juniper constructs in 20 minutes is a window into Gridlink’s greatest talent: the ability to coax evolution and establish depth in a deceptively brief period of time. Their intriguing, emotionally fluent melodies and complex progressions could sustain a sludge or death metal band for a full album of twice this duration, given a slower tempo and a mite more breathing room; the members have the chops and the inquisitive spirit to settle down into any psychedelic black metal lounge or pursue more conventional dalliances with long-form prog. And yet they will not: why do in 9 minutes what you can do in 90 seconds? With more power, more speed, and more blastbeats at that.

Matsubara’s guitars can lay the groundwork for an entire musical journey in just a few seconds of frenetic riffing: in the time it takes to sneeze, he’s slammed down a dirty chord and then run all the way up the fretboard to offer a blistering counterpoint in tremolo, layering himself over and over for added dissonance or melodic contrasts. “Nickel Grass Mosaic” is one of the best examples of his playing and of the musical growth achievable within a short span of time: Fajardo’s machine gun snare writhes and thrashes as it annihilates everything in its path at faster and faster rates, Chang shrieks with the wild, frenzied abandon of a hawk that has just had its face slammed in a car door, and Matsubara fires off riff after shred-infested riff to craft something far more engaging than a simple kick in the face.

Of course Coronet Juniper, like its predecessors, is so fast and vicious that it’ll leave you a bloody smear on the asphalt before you can even see its headlights breaching the horizon; Gridlink have not softened or slowed even slightly in all that time off, and if all you’re looking for is pure, lobotomizing savagery just like your Neanderthal ancestors used to make, this will fit the bill. Coronet Juniper can stand against any of its contemporaries for sheer self-rending violence. But this album is not only that: when you listen to a 70-second Gridlink song, you’re listening to a lot of thoughtfully considered musicianship and highly unusual technicality, an enhanced impact and a deeper feeling than what you’d get elsewhere. Chang and Fajardo both sound like they’re on the verge of exploding, and Matsubara sounds like he’s in a race to speed through every riff he’s ever thought of before he gets caught in the shockwave. Gridlink have definitely still got it – in fact, they’ve got more of it – and as long as that’s the case, every other grindcore band out there is going to feel a little more inadequate.