Which means — watch for the indie rock trope: it was valid then, and it's still valid now, and you even find it festering in the least likely of places: hello, Detroit techno! — that what's great about Olympic is how it's diversified its lineup just enough to widen the net a little while still only hiring bands who sound like they're only doing what they do for the sheer hell of it. Take "Sycophantic," the tenth track on Olympic's 2004 sampler (which I presume is free, though I can't find an email contact for them, so you're going to have to do the leg-work on your own). It's from a new one by Fleshgrind, a band that's been on Olympic since it was a tiny self-supporting label possibly based in Chicago. Fleshgrind's last album was awful, I know: I have it. But the track on the sampler has a mosh-worthy drive to it, and some working-man's-grind grit to the vocals, which butts nicely up against the Sabbath-on-Red-Bull riffs that form the song's bedrock. Same story with the demo here from the next Jungle Rot album: when Olympic signed Jungle Rot, they sucked. I couldn't figure out why anybody'd want to release records by 'em. But evidently something clicked between the band and the label, and evidently I didn't hear potential where somebody else did, because "Let Them Die" is a solid shard of gory death-metal with a misting of grind. Also here is a song from Vital Remains's Dechristianize, my favorite album of 2003.