The first time I heard Alienation Mental’s Ball Spouter CD, I was addicted. Their style was unlike anything I’d ever heard before and reminded me of when I first got into extreme music and every new band I heard sounded different from the last. There really isn’t much originality left in extreme heavy metal music, most bands are content with just playing different variations of the same styles of music over and over and over again. Thankfully, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, originality is not considered a musical sin and people are willing to experiment. Four Years… …Time Full Of Brutality was released last year on the underground label Burning Dogma Records. When it first came out, I hadn’t heard a thing about it, so I bought it immediately not knowing what to expect, after having already scooped up all of their other previous material. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this release was just all of their old split material combined with a few live tracks on one CD, all of which I already owned. The first 8 tracks are from the band’s amazing split with Malignant Tumour, which is one of the best split releases I’ve heard, with both halves sounding amazing. The next three tracks are from the band’s split with Inhumate, which also just happened to have been included on the band’s Kopferkingel followed by three live tracks. Listening to the material on the split with Malignant Tumour is like sitting in the front row of a Gallagher show, you don’t give a fuck about the 2 second prelude, you just want him to smash some watermelons and coat the crowd in sticky seed-filled goo. The music is relentless, beginning to end, just one savage beating after another with shredding riffs, piledriver drumming and angry drunken snoring hobo vocals. Jarda’s drumming style is just straight forward kick and punch as hard and as fast as you fucking can, which fits the music perfectly. The vocals are so ridiculously over the top that you can’t help but find them to be awesome, and the riffing is top-notch, definitely not the most technical material ever recorded, but for grindcore, it’s perfect. The thing I love is that the band doesn’t give a shit about having to stick to a certain formula, they’re willing to stick their necks out and be ridiculed for introducing different elements into their music, they do an incredibly heavy and punishing cover of Fear Factory’s "Big God Raped Souls", followed by an equally fistfuck-worthy rendition of my all-time favorite Carcass track "Corporeal Jigsore Quandary", while it’s not as good as the cover Vulgar Pigeons did a few years back, it’s still good enough to make me as giddy as a school girl. But wait, there’s more! The three tracks from the split with Inhumate are up next and are just sheer blasting brutal gore insanity, the opening track "The Restricted Cerebral Capacity" is one of my favorite songs of theirs, perfectly combining shrieking solos, cro-magnon drum crushing and burp gurgles. This style continues through the other two tracks from the release, and leaves me hungry for more. The last three tracks were recorded live in France in promotion of their Ball Spouter full length, and, honestly, sound like fucking shit. Here’s a little word of advice to record label owners, and band people; just because you recorded it live, doesn’t mean you should release it. You want the people buying your CD to feel what it’s like being at the front of the stage, banging their head, getting dropkicked by moshers behind them, not to hear what the band sounds like from the 8th stall at the men’s washroom taking a dump in the dirty toilet. Overall, anything by Alienation Mental to date is a must-own, and if you don’t already have the split with Malignant Tumour or Kopferkingel, then I’d definitely suggest picking up this album, however, I still think you’d be better off getting the above-mentioned releases separately, rather than buying this one. It’s great, but unnecessary, because then you’re missing out on Malignant Tumour’s half of their split (which is just as good) and the other 18 tracks on Kopferkingel.

Written By: Teufel