Guido the Bastard and Alberto the Crippler formed Cripple Bastards in 1988. Over the years the band has gotten progressively more extreme and even after the departure of Alberto the Crippler at the start of the decade, the band has looked solid and released a string of splits in proper grind core tradition.

2008 sees the band signed on to Barney Greenway’s FETO Records and the release of a brand new album Variante Alla Morte. With 24 songs clocking in at just less than 32 minutes, this is grindcore the way it was meant to be.

2003s Desperately Insensitive was the last album that I heard by this band and while that album was a bit cleaner in sound in comparison to their earlier stuff it was still completely uncompromising grind. Variante Alla Morte is a lot rougher around the edges and the band shows off the punk spirit at their music’s foundation in songs like Insofferenza and Marchio Catastale. There are also enough tasty thrash riffs thrown around this recording and just enough grooves to ensure that the album doesn’t become all grindcore noise. In fact Spirito Di Ritorsione adds a bit of modern Napalm Death to the flavour of the band’s sound and is really good.

It’s when the band stretches their songs to beyond the 3 minute mark that things get interesting. Sangue Chiama and Stupro E Addio are both terrific songs that go beyond 3 minutes and the ideas are allowed time to go somewhere. The rest of the album alternates between sub-1 minute blasts of grind and frustratingly incomplete sounding songs that stretch to a minute or two.

The album closes with the epic five minute plus Auto- Azzeramento which shows the band in a new light and sounds terrific going from slow and mid paced bits to all out grind blasts but comes too late to say the day. Ultimately Variante Alla Morte is great in short bursts but overall is not one of the band’s best releases.



Label - FETO records
Year of Release - 2008