- There’s something a bit funny about Grim Rhythm. You hear ‘em and you go: aw yeah, stoner! You lean back ecstatically and shred the air as their fuzzy wall of guitar washes over you. Wait, though: this is fast, lean, no-bullshit metal and like, really technical. It sounds great, those hugely warm stoner guitar sounds folded into zany rhythmic structures. Before you get back to your air-shredding again, I gotta ask - isn’t the whole point of stoner … aren’t you too wasted to do anything that requires concentration, let alone this machine-like precision? If you go and Google ‘technical stoner metal’ the list of bands you turn up is vanishingly small. About the closest thing I can think of is something like Lightning Bolt, but that’s not very close, is it?

Grim Rhythm themselves barely even turn up in your average trawl of the internet. The reason for this appears to be their absolutely uncompromising focus on the shred. They have time for virtually nothing else. Promotion, why bother? All they want to do is play. Write lyrics, find a vocalist? No, that would get in the way of playing. In one of the very few interviews I could find online, generic question number one was “what is your latest release?”, Grim Rhythm responded “Live band only”, presumably through gritted teeth. Honestly, I’m a little surprised they perform in public at all and the advent of their first LP is nothing short of shocking. I’m not even sure these guys have the time to get high.

All this being the case, the record is a happy surprise, these six meaty slabs of riffage are an impressive testament to knuckling down and spending endless hours smashing out the jams. You might think that a whole record with this needle-sharp focus would be a little boring for those who don’t completely share the band’s obsession with complex rhythms and effects pedals. Every time I listen though, I get from one end of the record to the other, just as enthused as when I started. Grim Rhythm know how to put a song together: neatly suturing pleasing riffs with proggy joins, through long, slow builds, growing to enormous climaxes, featuring entertaining solos and finally indulging, every now and then, in the occasional, hypnotic bout of krautish repetition.

Another strange thing about Grim Rhythm, given their monomaniacal focus -they’ve done a couple of things a lot of bands never get around to- like touring the US the other year and even forming their own record label to put out this ‘debut’. The record is called What Do You Know About Rock’n’Roll? Well it appears they know quite a lot and the more I find out about them, the more their understated smarts impress me. I get the feeling that this record could herald the beginning of a new cult institution in Aussie rock’n’roll. Grim Rhythm are still so shrouded in mystery, who can say? One thing I can say with great confidence:  these are some shredders who are giving me a seriously good feeling.

- Chris Cobcroft.