Undertakers |Global Dominion |Time To Kill Records

Brutal Assault and Dynamo Open Air, and bills with Napalm Death, Suffocation, Malevolent Creation, Vader, Cannibal Corpse, Vital Remains, Sinister, Dog Eat Dog, Krabathor, Disgorge, Pandemia and Ryker’s. Their discography is just as crooked and violent, from early demos like "In Limine Mortis" and "Beholding The Reality" to "Vision Distortion Perversion", "Dictatorial Democracy" and the 2024 split with Plakkaggio. The link with 99 Posse on a grindcore version of "Ripetutamente" also says a lot about their habit of dragging different worlds into extreme noise without asking for permission.

"Global Dominion" comes through Time To Kill Records with ten cuts of grindcore sharpened by death metal, hardcore impact and blackened edges. The production by Stefano Casanica, with mixing and mastering at Bloom Recording Studio by Stefano Casanica and Marco Mastrobuono, has enough definition to make the riffs readable, without sanding down the violence. The drums batter, the guitars saw forward, the bass gives the low end a nasty pulse, and Enrico Giannone’s vocal attack stays closer to insult than performance. The lyrical angle is built around control, power, social collapse, wealth, submission and resistance, with titles like "Plutocracy Era", "Iron Regime", "Collapse Protocol" and "Just Keep Fighting" leaving little space for mystery.

This is not a refined album, and that is also where part of its charm sits. Some passages hit harder than others, and a few ideas could have been trimmed with more cruelty, because Undertakers sounds best when the riff is filthy, short and mean. The album has age behind it, not in a tired way, more like a band that has been kicked around long enough to spit without posing. "Global Dominion" is blunt, angry and wired for damage, a good strike from an old Italian name that refuses to mellow out.

|7.5