I had a chance to see these guys over the summer when their tour took them through southern Pennsylvania, and was knocked flat by their spastic drum machine tech-shred robo assault. I had heard of them previously through the Genghis Tron guys, who had played with Cloacal Kiss several times on tour, but I had no idea quite how fucked up and manic these guys were. Was even more surprised to find out that the bassist for Cloacal Kiss used to play in a Boston band called Virulence, who released one of the best jazz/death metal hybrids ever with 2001's amazing A Conflict Scenario. Cloacal Kiss's intensely calculated death/grind is just as heavy and technical, with lightning fast pinball-machine fretboard sweeps, baffling, stop-on-a-dime death-jazz arrangements, and huge discordant math-metal grooves. It all reminds me of a 500 mph mashup of Necrophagist and Meshuggah and Behold...The Arctopus, with twisted vocals that switch between an incredibly harsh, larynx-destroying screech and sub-sonic death grunts. And then there's the drum programming, cold, clinical, and clearly computerized, reaching convoluted, hyperspeed blastbeat structures that the band deftly shred their way around. The computerized beats make Cloacal Kiss sound even more inhuman and calculated, a seemingly cyborg tyech/death/jazz killing squad clad in Tetsuo-esque flesh/metal imagery which is leavened a bit by the bands bizarre, tongue-in-cheek song titles such as "Carpathian Kitten" and "Necrobot". My fave track on this 26-minute mini-album? The closer "Easter", which starts off in hyper complex, confusing death mode, and then somewhere halfway thru the song suddenly evolves into a beautiful hypno-metal mantra, like Meshuggah hijacking Genghis Tron's synths off of Dead Mountain Mouth and riding a single heavenly riff off into the distance. Righteous tech grind insanity for fans of everything from Necrophagist to Behold The Arctopus to Agoraphobic Nosebleed.