Album Review: Concrete Winds – “Concrete Winds” (Death Metal/Grindcore)

Written by Kep

I remember the first time I heard Concrete Winds’ Nerve Butcherer back in 2021. It was like a whirlwind laced with razor wire and nails had ripped me from the ground and was tossing me around at 300 mph. It was sheer aggression, an unflinching chaotic tornado of pain, and that kind of thing leaves an indelible impression on a listener. Some bands just go harder than the rest, and Concrete Winds is one of those bands. 

Their self-titled third LP picks things up exactly where Nerve Butcherer left off and delivers more of the same. Their ultraviolent blend of death metal and grindcore chews you up and spits you unceremoniously out, maimed and leaking various body fluids onto the pavement. It’s a fine-tuned destruction machine with throttle blown wide open and brake lines cut, the key broken off in the ignition to ensure there’s no hope of bringing it to a halt. Concrete Winds brings the agony full bore for a grand total of 25 minutes, and when all is said and done it wreaks far more carnage than albums twice its length. 

At the basic level, I think it’s hard to imagine a death metal + grindcore split that incorporates both sides of that equation as evenly as Concrete Winds does. It’s the most aggressive of both worlds, chaotic and breathless but calculated, grounded, and plenty heavy. The riffs fly fast and furious, making heavy use of dissonance, chromatic motion, and fiercely angular acrobatics, following an unceasing cannon volley from down below. Drummer M’s uncompromisingly ferocious attack behind the kit is both wickedly fast and ruthless in its brutality; his blasts are the engine that drives their whole sound, and his ability to control the flow by flipping from meter to meter at the drop of a hat is invaluable to their little-to-no-firm-ground approach. He grounds the wildness of the grindier moments in bludgeoning power, but he’s not afraid to play a filthy d-beat, either. 

Frontman PJ’s work on the guitar feels like he threw a bunch of dissonant death metal into a blender with several handfuls of spiraling grindcore riffs, snatched out the choicest bits, and played them at double tempo. He gets a ton of mileage out of the sort of rapid crawling patterns that skitter back and forth, rising in pitch before dropping down to do it all again. Nearly everything is frenetic, but none of it is sloppy or rough around the edges; it’s crunchy but unerringly precise, conjuring frantic feelings of suffocating claustrophobia and chaos through violent calculation. He rips off solo after solo, too, and they waste no time at all getting wooly and wild; in fact, the first of them, a breathless thing that seems to ever more urgently ascend a staircase to hell, kicks in barely 10 seconds into first track “Permanent Dissonance”, and there’s another dizzying example near the song’s end. Dizzying is a particularly apt word for much of what the guitars do here: the importance of chromaticism in PJ’s leadwork (and the leadwork of MH, their live lead guitarist who contributed session leads on three tracks here) can’t be overstated, and it seems like every track features spiraling half-steps in at least a couple spots. 

This sort of relentlessly fast, aggressive grinding death—especially with the appropriately loud, noisy production here—can wear a listener down if there isn’t variety, but Concrete Winds do just enough to make the listen palatable on that front. The quick 25-minute length feels like it’s over in an instant, so listener stamina isn’t much of an issue. There isn’t a ton of variety in terms of tempo, but songs like “Subterranean Persuasion” get chuggier and chunkier, heavier and more stompy. The first four tracks do sort of run together and get samey (though the quintessentially grind opening of “Daylight Amputations”—four fast snare pops—helps it stand out), but they take up a grand total of eight minutes between them, and the back half of the album mixes things up a bit more. “Systematic Distortion”, for example, uses a simple three-punch rhythm with a space after as its basis, thick and meaty, with interjecting guitar licks sliding helter-skelter downward as periodic highlights. “Demented Gospels” gets downright martial for a bit in its first half, marching to maniacally accented beats, and closer “Pounding Devotion” will shred your nerves to pieces with its banshee-wailing guitar screams that paint murky streaks of blood over all. 

There really isn’t a lot more to say. Concrete Winds is a nerve-jangling berserker trip into the epicenter of a cyclone. The mix is loud and thrusts the fusillade of drums to the forefront where it belongs, but doesn’t sacrifice the abrasiveness of the guitars to get it there. Producer Lawrence Mackrory does an admirable job balancing the jacked up levels of sheer aggression present in every part, including PJ’s barbaric midrange screams, which enter at a fever pitch and never back down. All elements match each other’s caustic levels of spite to an almost overwhelming degree, and I wouldn’t change a thing. 

THE BOTTOM LINE

There are few bands out there ripping as hard and fast as Concrete Winds, and this effort is further proof of that. If you’re the type who prefers dynamic shifts and thoughtful progressiveness in your metal, look elsewhere; but if you want a listen to utterly fuck you up in as violent and unapologetic a way as possible, this is the shit for you.