Meat and potatoes death / grind, no room for niceties or restraint, where surrender is a dirty word and weapons set on anything less then obliterate is strictly for pussies. That’s the world of Misery Index, and if you can’t take the heat, pal, you know where the door is, get to steppin’.

On their second full length, Misery Index has honed their attack down to an exact science — no excess, no fat, just pure pinpoint aggression. Every track barrels along with impunity within its two- to four-minute framework, terminates, next track starts, repeat. You wouldn’t want a steady diet of this stuff, lord knows, but if you have 30 minutes to spare every now and again, there’s a hardly better ride out there.

So, yeah, it’s all teeth gnashing, arm flailing and full body convulsions. The riffs are beyond whipfast, Jason Netherton’s vox caustic enough to strip paint and, in drummer Adam Jarvis, they’ve got an absolute beast behind the kit; his speed and accuracy enough to embarrass most other drummers in the field and his tireless double kick work enough to make those same hitters wish they’d never added a second bass drum to their set up.

Those elements alone lift them up among the likes of Dying Fetus (of which two of the current members are alums), Circle of Dead Children and forefathers Napalm Death. What keeps them in that upper echelon is subtle nuances scattered to and fro: brief, mid-tempo (by comparison) slow-downs, a brief melodic refrain on one track, ascending dual guitar work that finds its way into another and jumpy, gone-before-you-know-it leads intruding on several others. These deviations don’t pretty up any of the songs; they’re prickly all by their lonesome and the contrast makes their de rigueur issue brutality just that much more damaging. (7/10)