Bandcamp Jesus Crustus are a Berlin two-piece working the productive intersection between crust-punk, d-beat, grindcore and sludge that the German underground has kept alive across the last decade. El Crustadore, released May 1, is the band’s new full-length: fifteen tracks across roughly thirty-two minutes, all written by Jan and Chris, all lyrics by Keksgrinder (with Nadja and Chris on selected cuts), guest vocals from Tina on three tracks (Fin-Gore-Nailz, Make A Wish, Objectophilia II) and a backing choir from Harmony Dies on WarSaw. Recorded at Noir Surge Studio by Christian Eggers. The kind of fifteen-track listing where the longest cut is under four minutes and several pieces clock at under ninety seconds.
That track-length distribution is the album’s defining structural decision. El Crustadore runs “Intro” (1:06), “The Crust Is Alive” (2:32), “Fin-Gore-Nailz” (1:51), “Mary-Anne’s Embrace” (3:35), “CopPorn” (1:26), “Make A Wish” (3:48), “Objectophilia II” (3:58), “WarSaw” (2:17), “Shut Up And…” (1:42), “Kraft Durch Rausch” (2:24), “Baptized In Crust” (2:40), “Scripted Brutality” (1:14), “Lot” (2:04), “Words” (0:13), and “The Urge” (1:30). Several pieces operate on the punk principle that a riff doesn’t need a chorus and a song doesn’t need to outstay its welcome.
The Longer Cuts and the Guest Voices
The album’s longer pieces are where the band’s range becomes clearest. “Make A Wish” at three and forty-eight minutes (Tina on guest vocals) opens into the album’s most sludge-leaning territory, with the harsh-shouted vocals trading off against Tina’s harsher-still-but-different-timbre passages. “Objectophilia II” at three and fifty-eight is the album’s longest piece and the closest the band gets to a proper composition: tempo shifts, an extended instrumental middle section, the rhythm section locked tightest of any cut on the record. “Mary-Anne’s Embrace” at three and a half pulls into mid-tempo crust-with-doom-touches territory.
“Kraft Durch Rausch” (German title that puns on the Nazi-era “Strength Through Joy” slogan into “Strength Through Intoxication”) is the kind of anti-fascist black humour the German crust scene has been working since the early 90s; the song reads as expected — d-beat-into-crust with the title’s irony doing most of the political lifting. “WarSaw” with the Harmony Dies backing choir is the album’s most ambitious arrangement; the choir passages give the track a different harmonic dimension than crust-grindcore typically allows.
The shorter pieces serve the genre’s lineage purpose — punctuation, mood-setting, raw transitional energy. “Words” at thirteen seconds is the album’s micro-track per crust-tradition; “Scripted Brutality” at one minute fourteen is a quick blast-beat punch. “CopPorn” at one and twenty-six and “The Crust Is Alive” at two and a half work the band’s most overtly punk vocabulary.
The Production Decision
The honest read on El Crustadore is that the production does exactly what crust-grindcore in this register is supposed to do, and that’s a feature for the genre’s standing audience and a barrier for everyone else. Noir Surge Studio’s recording is dense, mid-focused, deliberately raw, with vocals mixed extremely dry and forward (Tina’s guest passages slightly drier still), guitars saturated into a single sawtooth wall, bass blurred into the kick on the d-beat passages, drums room-mic’d with limited high-end air on cymbals.
The cost shows up the way it always does on crust-grindcore records — frequency stacking in the upper-mids causes listener fatigue across the full runtime, the cleaner moments are few and brief, the bass-and-kick rarely separate. The trade-off is the band’s commitment to the genre’s interior aesthetics; they’re not trying to dress up the lo-fi approach as something it isn’t.
Fifteen tracks across around thirty-two minutes, recorded at Noir Surge Studio by Christian Eggers. Production approach is consistent: brick-walled mastering, dense mid-focused frequency balance with stripped high-end air, guitars maximally saturated into a single textural wall, bass functioning as low-mid foundation that often fuses with the kick on the d-beat passages, drums room-mic’d with clicky kick attack and dry-snare body, cymbals limited in the upper frequencies. Vocals (Keksgrinder primarily, Tina on three guest tracks, Harmony Dies as backing choir on “WarSaw”) are placed dry and forward in the mix; the guest passages add textural variety without breaking the album’s overall vocal-forward consistency. Dynamic argument works at the song-level (intro/blast/coda) rather than within sustained passages. The longest tracks (“Objectophilia II,” “Make A Wish”) have the cleanest dynamic structure on the album; the shortest pieces (“Words,” “Scripted Brutality”) work the genre’s pure-blast vocabulary. Frequency stacking in the upper-mids is the album’s defining production trade-off and is consistent across the runtime as deliberate aesthetic commitment rather than engineering failure.
Standout tracks: Objectophilia II for the album’s longest piece and most structurally ambitious cut. Make A Wish for the Tina guest-vocal interplay across the album’s most sludge-leaning composition. WarSaw for the Harmony Dies backing-choir arrangement on the album’s most distinctive single texture.
Worth your time if you live in the German crust-grindcore underground and appreciate fifteen-track records that commit fully to the genre’s lo-fi production aesthetic and short-form structural approach. El Crustadore is the work of a Berlin two-piece that has decided what kind of band it wants to be and isn’t softening that decision for outside audiences.
