A vicious double-shot of French avant-grind! We were already fans of The Fantastikol Hole, a drummachine-powered outfit that mashes insanely complex and

jagged grindcore with equally confounding digital rhythms, massive blastbeat action, and a fractured IDM vibe that is somewhat comparable to the kind of

fucked-up electronica beats that Genghis Tron employed on Dead Mountain Mouth. Fantastikol Hole's Mathematikol Oil album is in our opinion

one of the best "drum machine grind" albums ever, right up there with machine augemented faves like Genghis Tron, Wadge, and Agoraphobic Nosebleed; if you're

a fan of weird, schizophrenic, futuristic-sounding grindcore, you seriously need to check that one out. So here we are with this new split album which

features a whopping 17 tracks from the 'Hole, all of em new and exclusive, and just as awesome sounding as their album. Blistering neo-grind metal, with

angular meaty riffing and bestial shrieks/distorto roars trading off, is torn apart and stapled back together with glitchy fractured beats, passages of

almost total silence suddenly welling up out of a blasting math grind tornado, abrasive electronic textures, breakbeats, weird dissonant rock riffing, bits

of French cafe music, samples of mysterious wind instruments, and weird unidentifiable percussive noises. Seriously weird and megaheavy and surreal, like

Genghis Tron, Pig Destroyer, and Antigama mashed together with random transmissions of French pop and IDM and old hip hop 12"s into a super heavy

and ultra damaged cyclone of electro blastcore violence.

How were ESB going to match up to the bizarreness and brutality of The Fantastikol Hole? Not too shabby, actually. Hadn't heard these guys before this

split, but we definitely dug their freaked out version of chaotic grindcore, which manages to sound like they take influence from both 90's powerviolence and

epic French post-hardcore. Yeah, that might seem weird, but their songs (12 of 'em to be exact) manage to pack in an interesting combination of brutal HC

damage a la Infest and Crossed Out with majestic, melodic parts that remind us of bands like Gantz, Amanda Woodward, Cortez, and Envy. Cortez sort of did the

same thing, blending brutal grindy HC with epic, brooding heaviness, but ESB are way more ragged and thrashy and savage sounding, while throwing in the odd

electronic noise track, sudden departures into French pop, and alien sounding electronic textures into the mix to keep things interesting.