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SF064
Beg
s/t LP





1. Beg To Exist
2. Rudimentary Penile Comparisons In The Dark
3. In My Time Of Dining
4. Your Cash Is Being Cunted
5. Dustbin Hoffman
6. Doom Dance Dick Grope
7. Chicken And Chips Black Metal
8. Livid After Midnight (Rotting Till The Dawn)
9. He's Shit His Self
10. Goat Bless
11. Third Testicle Envy
12. Rush Are My Favourite Power Violence Band
13. Pizza Shit
14. Douglas
15. My Feelings Are Bigger Than Your Cock

Beg is a trio making intense grind metal of the very best kind. It's hard not to mention the "supergroup" thing, with Smith from The Afternoon Gentlemen on drums and Grief from Art Of Burning Water playing guitar, and it sounds like it. Twisted and complicated but with tons of driving fury that brings to mind both the old and new skools. This came out as a CD on Hygiene Records last year and is now on vinyl, limited to 250 or so on the blackest of black vinyl with screened sleeves.



Released 18/07/14.



Ltd. to 250 copies on black.



Beg | Smith, Ed, Geith | Facebook

Collective-Zine
Of the 15 tracks here, almost half of them use a swear word or a reference to genitalia in their title. Four titles contain a pun of some sort. The best title, which features neither of these things, is named 'Chicken And Chips Black Metal'. It's hard to know what this last one is all about, but it's pretty good and borderline profound in its own strange way. Mirthsome as it all may be, there's still that worry: is this just going to be another dose of jokey, half-baked Spazz or Charles Bronson-aping slop? Thankfully not, because Beg are smarter chaps than that and also spend a chunk of their time with the likes of Art Of Burning Water and the Afternoon Gentlemen, which means they know what they're bloody well doing when it comes to making an ornery racket. Beg sound like they're caught somewhere between these two worlds: they're grind as fuck and make no mistake, but amid the frantic speed and swill-gargling vocals there are also plenty of jagged jabs to the brain and canny sidesteps that make this more than just a vicious, blastbeat-laden monster. There's the wobbly riff that closes out 'Dustbin Hoffman' (chortle!), for instance, or the slugabed pummel of 'Doom Dance Dick Grope' (snurt!) and the mid-paced groove of – hee! – 'Livid After Midnight (Rotting Till The Dawn)', all of which suggest that buried beneath the Brutal Truth / Discordance Axis grind heroics there's a furrow-browed Craw fan just dying to smash his way out. My advice: keep him there for a bit longer yet, because the balance right now is just perfect.

Grind To Death
So the fast few years have seen Britain go on such a blast beat bender its a miracle our heads don't go pop under all that sonic excess, leaving behind a headless punk-patched anthropomorphic fountain pumping blood and cheap store brand cider in equal measure (dibs on that for a cover art) . One culprit from this very scene who would certainly be up there on the blast induced decapitation level if it was a genuine phenomenon would be Beg. Beg are one part boozy blasters the afternoon gentlemen, another part alchemical sludgemasters the art of burning water and one part stranger, combining for an extrovert blend of elastic grind that does not cease to keep you on edge on a passage by passage basis. Gluttonous in both tunage and in tonnage Beg has indiscriminately wedged itself between a routine of manic chastisement and off kilter groove, driven by Smiths increasingly unorthodox drum routine and a string progression that is about as stonewall as a mammoth in plate mail there is no stopping this band once the play button has been pressed. Beg exude a uniqueness that charms to no end, warlike in its components yet executed with such delirium that it almost seems arbitrary. Despite such a wide play style and erratic tumbles between them, Beg generate sufficient centrifugal force in keeping it all together and on track. So those looking to self flagellate, or those who want to break up their playlist from its sorry and stale predictability of punk tropes and riffs then look no further than Beg!

The Sleeping Shaman
Featuring Grief from London-based filth-mongerers Art Of Burning Water on guitar and Elliot Smith from like-minded grinders The Afternoon Gentlemen on drums, Beg excel in the kind of power-violence oriented grind that hits as quickly and accurately as drive-bys. With fifteen short, brutal slabs squeezed into less than quarter of an hour, it’s not just an album that warrants repeated listens, but one that practically demands it, the full run-time breezing past in the time it takes you to stop marvelling at the, frankly genius, song titles (Rush Are My Favourite Power Violence Band, Dustbin Hoffman and Chicken And Chips Black Metal are minor masterworks in their own right). In a shining example of doing less with more, Beg never really seem to re-tread much ground here, flitting from old-school death grind a la Repulsion to the more up-to-date groove-heavy crush of Nasum and Rotten Sound while still keeping a few touches of their day jobs intact. There’s no predefined sense of style or tempo, so the album sometimes has the feel of a collage of monstrosity, a cut-and-paste grotesquery where downbeat sludge, crust ferocity and blastbeat-oriented insanity can share borders somewhat comfortably. Smith’s drums are sharp and relentlessly on-point throughout, occasionally staggeringly so, and Grief’s handiwork is all over this, the guitars taking on a murky, septic tone that toes the line between precision noise and the sickening recitation of society’s ills. As for vocalist Ed? It’s doubtful that they could have found a better voice for this project, his grunts and screeches utterly feral yet split pretty evenly between hardcore and death hues. There are certainly no shortages of quality grind bands these days, but Beg certainly manage to stand out. Those song titles; the samples, quoting everything from The Mighty Boosh to cult 80s anti-racism flick Babylon; the fact that they manage to include everything a good grind album should have while still chucking in searing power electronics, chunky breakdowns and sludge so thick that you could lose your shoes in it. Rather than completely abandon melody, it’s tentatively included in its most rudimentary guises, never openly apparent yet pervasive enough that at least a few of these beasts will be crawling around in your skull for a while. Tongue-in-cheek misanthropia or just plain filth? Either way, Beg makes it work.