PROLETAR
Back To Hatevolution CD
(multiple-label release)

First of all, I would like to advise you people to NOT subject yourselves to one hour plus of blasting grindcore right after waking up. You see, I spent last night reading Redemption Song: The Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer, a book that has been taking a lot of my free time these past few weeks, and this time it kept me awake until 6 am.

When I woke up at at 10 this morning, I knew that I need more of that deep slumber. My head’s thumping and eyes blurry, but this PROLETAR CD stared at me. I’ve been ignoring it for a while now, so…

Gurghhhhhh!!

Well, I lied. Thing is when I put this on, I was so inspired I spent 3 hours searching for some “grind”-related bands and recordings which I loved with much vengeance back in the days when I was sleeping on crusty, sperm-stained and lice-ridden four-inch plastic-foam mattresses in late-80s, early-90s Brickfields.

First I looked for Necrony‘s Severe Malignant Pustule demo 1991. That was a huge favourite. We had the original tape! Then I remembered another Swedish classic, General Surgery! So I trawled for their promising-but-poorly-recorded 1990 demos and that amazing Necrology 7″ released by Relapse back in 1993. And then something else hit me, what about Old Lady Drivers? Yeah, James Plotkin may now be quite a studious, academic-like “sound-artist” but back then when Earache was king, OLD tickled me pink!

And yes, I found them all! God bless mp3s! And along the way I stumbled upon another forgotten gem, Excel‘s Split Image LP from 1987! It’s not grindcore lah, but hell when it comes to classic crossover, you can’t deny Excel’s place in the pantheon of greats.

Bloody hell! I am so happy, I will not be going to the shop today. Gonna sit here and vegetate with some nostalgic noise!!

So what about Proletar? Well, this old Jakarta bunch may not be anywhere near all the bands mentioned above but their latest bunch of songs featured here (11 tracks from October 2005 and released as the Physical & Mental Torture tape) are all the bloody good! They are all pretty much in the style of old-school grindcore, when “grindcore” was grindcore and not tacked with “grind-death”. “gore-grind” etc.

The rest of the tracks, dating back to 2000 with one Ari Bowo as a part of the twin vocals attack, are pretty much fun but not-really-re-listenable exercises – throughout the years, they were experimenting with a lot of the late-90s grind/crust permutations of styles (including the lessons learned from Assuck). All good and bitching, but mostly poorly recorded, thus ripping them off their “constantly-on-rotation” promise. You listen to them once and say, “yeah! cool” but there’s no desire to rewind it for another go.

The thing about grindcore which many people forgot to mention is that it’s mostly about the “sound”. You can play triple-speed fast, you can growl and you can even temper that with some wikked contrasting twin-vocals, but without proper engineering and production values fleshing out that belly-scraping gurgling low bass, dead-on tight-snare drumming and odorous cookie-monster vocals, you are at sea. Well, at least, for me.

All of that mentioned, this is nevertheless a very good buy. Right from the nice packaging to the discographic nature of the project, Hatevolution documents Proletar from its loose but raging baby steps to the band’s current finely-focussed monstrosity. So far I’ve rotated through the first 11 tracks four times already. I’m hooked!

[rating:3.5/5]

Listen to The Arrogant:

[audio:http://invisibleoranges.com/audio/PROLETAR_THEARROGANT.mp3]

PROLETAR‚Ä®
c/o: IPULETAR‚Ä®
Jl Pusdiklat Depnaker 58
Rt.018/01 Kp Makasar

Jakarta Timur 13560
INDONESIA
proletarmince at yahoo dot com
Proletar MySpace