The Summary Judgment Review:
Title: Red on Chrome
Artist: Crowpath
Label: Willowtip
Release Date: 4/20/04

Rating: 3 Skulls
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    • Reviewed by Slither (7/20/05):
    The word frantic until this point brought horrible memories to the surface of my mind. If you catch my drift; a breed of memories that were rather Fran-tick-tick-tock...like a time bomb of crapulence. That saintly and angered definition of the word has since been cleansed from my mind with extreme prejudice. If you thought most grindcore was tumultuous and non-linear, allow me to introduce you to Crowpath.

    With an affinity for inverted wave forms and eerie feedback as track openers Red on Chrome leaps feet first into chaos bordering on absurdity. Sounding like the bastard child of Mastodon and a bug scratching methamphetamine addict, the album is an experiment in overwrought and at times self absorbed percussion. Struggling to be equally impressive in instrumentation is what amounts to some of the most simplistic guitar playing ever allowed into metal's tech enthusiast club. One certainly can not accuse the guitarists of slacking, but when the drum kit insists on being so frenetic there is precious little opportunity for the stringed instruments to stretch past upper neck slam chords and meandering tremolo picking. Ascending hammer-ons and acrobatic pull-offs abound but not in a fashion that implies intention and purpose.

    Staunch compression on the recording as a whole gives the music an unsavory blunt edge. The ears interpret this hyperactive and caustic music and the mind then assumes it would be less constrained. But because of what I feel is excessive knob turning, sounds are not allowed to reach completion in a fashion that would help the intended nature of the music branch out. In essence, the engineer has taken a man six feet tall and told him to stand erect in a room with a five foot ceiling. Where is the beef one might ask? Lost in the same hole the bass guitar and all secondary tones fell into.

    The title track of this intensely compact thirty minute album is perhaps my favorite. Here, the cumbersome production complements the music as the band slows down for some delightful sludge n' grind that would seem more at home on a Warhorse album. The respite is short lived and immediately afterwards it's back to the feeling of tumbling down a steep embankment with a cacophony of instruments. While I consistently applaud the road Willowtip has taken and certainly consider this band to be interesting, there are too many faults both in the recording and the approach for Red on Chrome to be my cup of tea. Rabid fans of all that is random and unfocused will embrace it because the work is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack but overall my opinion is that it is less than stellar.
    3 out of 5

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