Two bands, one American, the other Italian, and both serving up some brutal noise-damaged grindcore brutality that clocks in at right under 20 minutes. Psychofagist, I love those guys. I've been a fan since I picked up their debut album that that Italian label Headfucker put out years ago, and anytime these guys put something new out, I'm going to be all over it. Mixing together jazz and grindcore isn't new - hell, it's been almost 20 years since Painkiller blew our skulls apart with their potent free jazz/grind/death dub experiments - but there just aren't that many bands that have the jazz chops as well as the grind chops. Psychofagist are one of the few that do, and I'm really stoked to hear their new stuff now that the guy from Zu has joined the band.

The Psychofagist tracks on this split CD, of which there are three, were recorded before the new lineup changes took effect, but these songs still deliver everything I love about this band: brutal grindcore with awesome gutteral vocals and chaotic minigun blastbeats, wailing free-jazz sax skronk, skronky improvised free-noise clatter, and crushing, angular prog/no wave riff workouts wedged in between the hyperspeed grind blasts. There's two new songs here, plus a weird cover of "Laredo" from Tomahawk that includes the singer doing his best Mike Patton impression (which actually ain't all that bad), about ten minutes of brutal howling jazz-grind chaos. Killer!

Now, Thousandswilldie were new to me when I picked this up, but they don't disappoint either. This guitar/drums/vocals trio are from the Bay Area and have another 7" that came out on R.S.R. that I'd like to check out, and there are also some awesome live pics floating around online of these guys playing live that look like they put on an insane show, all covered in blood and setting their cymbals on fire and tearing up the stage like a youth crew band that was slipped some angel dust. Which is exactly how I pictured them when listening to their side of this split. Thousandswilldie rage through sixteen songs, hardly any of them more than 40 seconds long, blazing through feral hyperspeed grind that sounds like a collision of old school Earache blast and Man Is The Bastard style hardcore, the singer somehow leaping from insane gutteral roars to punky, super pissed off screams in the blink of an eye, and blending in an assortment of looped samples, grungy electronic noise and murky ambience with the grind. The noise/loop stuff actually shows up alongside the grind riffs and blastbeats in some of the songs or is used as interludes between songs, and it reminds me of the murky noise experiments you could have found on an old RRRecords cassette from the 80's. I really dug these tracks, and will be on the lookout for more stuff from these guys for sure.

Packaged in a six-panel full color digipack.