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.
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.
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.
