It's been years since the last time that I picked up a 7" with Agathocles on it, even though I've always been a fan of their faithful, tried-and-true old-school grind. The Belgian grinders are one of the few constants in underground grindcore, and have a discography that has by now reached absurd lengths with a prolific output that rivals Merzbow and Unholy Grave. Honestly, after I picked up the discography CDs of Agathocles 90's singles that Selfmadegod put out, I just couldn't bring myself to try to keep up with their subsequent hundreds of EPs. It's too daunting a task.

I jumped on this newish split EP with Agathocles when Logan Butler, one of the members of the other band on the split and a longtime Crucial Blast customer, got in touch to tell me about his project. His band goes by J. Briglia/L. Butler/D. Schoonmaker/J. Williams, like they are a jazz quartet or something, but their music is anything but. On the J. Briglia, L. Butler, D.Schoonmaker & J.Williams side of this 7", the "band with no name" (as they also sometimes call themselves) blast you in the face with three tracks of ultra-raw blackened thrash that sounds like old school West Coast extreme hardcore like Crossed Out or Infest mixed with truly scummy primitive black metal, each song a tangled chaotic blast of trebly buzzsaw riffs and sloppy blastbeats and pounding sludgy dirge and shrieking vocals, and then drown the whole thing in caustic, speaker-shredding noise a la Merzbow. Nice! The sound is extremely raw and blown, giving distorto-blackpunk bands like Akitsa and Malveillance a run for their money in the noise department, but the waves of electronic screech and molten burblings that wash over the blackened power-violence and ooze up between the cracks in the songs gives this a weird, noxious aura of it's own. This is what I'd imagine Gasp might have turned into if those guys had been ardent fans of the seriously low-fi underground black metal.

After that mayhem , the Agathocles songs almost sound comforting. If you've heard them before, you know what to expect with their six songs: blasting, detuned grindcore with dual vocalists, one belching out pissed-off socially conscious lyrics in a deep, gutteral voice, the other shrieking in that high-pitched, electroshock scream, tons of crusty Carcass-esque riffs, midpaced punky breakdowns, ferocious blastbeats, the works. Agathocles haven't evolved one step beyond the raw, anti-corporate grindcore that they started out with over twenty years ago, but dammit, they sound just as brutal and ferocious as ever. Limited to 400 copies.