Band:	Cloud Rat
Album:	Pollinator
Style:	Grindcore
Release date:	September 2019

01. Losing Weight
02. Delayed Grief // Farmhouse Red
03. Seven Heads
04. Night Song
05. Wonder
06. The Mad
07. Al Di La
08. Last Leaf
09. Zula
10. Biome
11. Webspinner
12. Luminescent Cellar
13. Marionettes
14. Perla

Honey, I'm home.

I'll be honest with you, Pollinator is probably the first new piece of anything more metal than RuPaul I've listened to in more than 18 months. My last interaction with Cloud Rat dated back to 2015, when they released Qliphoth, and yet I was able to immediately recognize their unique brand of grindcore upon listening to this new album.

One particular thing that will jump out at your throat is the unchecked violence of the first few tracks. Cloud Rat does not waste time in polite chitchat: it's clear sounding, high-pitched pure grind/powerviolence that serves as introduction. People who are unfamiliar with the band would expect that to continue for 10 more minutes and come to a stop after a final primal scream, but that's not what Pollinator does. It reels you in with the traditional yet very well executed ferocious beginning, and waits until you're comfortable to mess you up with some much bleaker songs.

Without ever losing any of its bite, Pollinator shows a clear progression that invites you to sit down and appreciate the depth of the songwriting. Gloomy transitions, carefully placed slower tempos, anguished screams suddenly breaking through and launching an attack of frantic guitars, everything comes together to cloak that grind in an additional layer of trauma. Over the short span of a half hour, the band manages to weave a dark web made of the most delicate yet razor-sharp silk.

Cloud Rat has matured, and is now in full bloom. What indicates that to me isn't the change in moods - because they have gifted us with plenty dark tunes in the past - it's the overall impression that the band now "owns" this darkness. Like a person who learned to live with their wounds and demons, it's inextricably spun into their songs, rather than showing through a thinner fabric of pure violence.

This is the main reason why this fourth album gets better and better with successive spins. It doesn't reveal its best kept nectar until you've accepted to lose yourself and plunge down to the deep end of the pistil several times. Just be careful not to drown.