Tusk

Get Ready [reissue] (2006)

Aubin Paul

With Pelican scoring the unlikely coup of a high profile position on the Taste of Chaos tour, it is a perfect time to look back at the band that eventually formed Pelican -- all the while crossing your fingers in the hopes that the band will throw one of these tracks into their set.

Get Ready, the first album from Tusk -- who are essentially three-quarters of Pelican with the addition of a vocalist -- couldn't be more different. In short, while Pelican specializes in atmospheric metal in the vein of Mogwai or Isis, Tusk delivers over-the-top, grinding hardcore. Think Discordance Axis with Fugazi filling in for Napalm Death. While their later recordings -- particularly 2004's Tree of No Return -- show a greater flair for experimentalism and noise, Get Ready is about as sparse and straightforward as you would hope a band could be.

While grind-influenced music has typically had a reputation for sloppiness, each of the ten studio tracks that make up Get Ready is a surgically precise performance. Tracks are built of overlapping layers of sound, and while there is plenty of chaos, the band manages to reign things in just enough to prevent things from sounding like a mess of blast beats.

With the recent reissue of Get Ready from Hewhocorrupts, Inc., the album has finally recieved the treatment it always deserved. Fresh new artwork from Isis' Aaron Turner, a flawless remastering job, and bonus material help this issue absolutely supplant the prior edition and a thoroughly worthwhile purchase for fans of the band or the genre in general.