All Hands On Deck

For this post I figured I'd continue by giving everyone some more Houston underground stuff.

I saw All Hands On Deck circa 2006 at Emo's in Austin with Robinson, Signs of Collapse, and some other bands I don't remember. Fucking killer show. I went to see Robinson and had no idea who these guys were. They were the first band to play and it didn't take me long to realize that they weren't your typical opening band.

Let me preface this by saying I never know what to call this type of music because associating it with grindcore just seems to piss people off, but at the same time the only way I have heard it described is "tech grind" or some other similar phrase. So until there is a better label for it, I'm not going to concern myself with the finer points of what is or isn't grindcore. If you are a grindcore elitist, you probably won't like this band. You will probably complain about how it's just "faux technical wankery" and that it has nothing in common with Napalm Death. My response: "is that such a bad thing?"

While this type of music was mostly a flash in the pan, I greatly admired the spirit a lot of the bands had while they lasted. To me, All Hands On Deck exemplified what I loved most about this music and what its detractors most despised about it. It was chock full of technical chromatic riffage just for the sake of being technical and had a vocalist that sounded like a school girl. What's not to love about that?

Unfortunately, I only have two songs to offer but I find that no matter how many times I listen to them they remain just as fresh as they were in Austin four years ago. If you have any more of their material, for the love of god give it to me.

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