The Dublin, Ireland doom metal scene is represented on this new 10", which features one massive track each from Wreck Of The Hesperus and De Novissimis, and just as we'd expect from a single piece of vinyl matching up these two bands, this is seriously heavy shit. Both of these bands are already known to me, Wreck Of The Hesperus through their excellent full-length on Aesthetic Death that came out a year or two ago, and De Novissimis through their CDR demo that we used to carry and a recent 7" that came out on Rimbaud. Both bands put their own spin on ultra-slow, noxious doom/sludge, and each side weighs down on you like a pallet of concrete blocks.

Wreck Of The Hesperus are up first with "Raw Sewage Heart", a hideous splooge of blackened ultradoom that focuses on one monstrous riff wading through about ten minutes of buzzing feedback, garbled amplifier drone, and fithy low-end rumble. The riff is totally crushing, and the band plays at a sickeningly slow 10 bpm crawl with huge pauses between each crashing chord and pounding bass-drum hit, but it's the vocals that really make this as diseased and demonic as it is. You've got to wait awhile for 'em - the vocaltist doesn't show up until three or four minutes in, when the band is totally immersed in septic sludge - but when they finally kick in, it sounds like Regan from The Exorcist fronting Toadliquor, with multiple voices all coming out of the same throat at the same time, bestial death metal roars, psychotic cackles, weird slurping noises that sounds like someones chowing down on a plate of mashed potatoes. The drumming is also really cool, throwing in busy martial snare rhythms and rolls in between each suspended riff, and adding a coiled tension to their corrosive doom. Total slime!

Contrasting Wreck Of The Hesperus's hellish descension with their own crusty nihilism, De Novissimis deliver a vicious track called "Worthy Of Nothing" for their side of this split, a near 10 minute blast of depressing, fatalist lyrics, long stretches of shimmering feedback, high pitched yowling vocals that trade off with deeper, more gutteral death metal style growls, and the expected glacial propulsion. The riffs are more atmospheric than you might expect though; slightly dissonant chords drift across the lumbering drumming, while another guitar plays a creepy minor key melody, and the song occasionally breaks away into total ambient drift where it's just the guitars chiming away and rumbling in space, only to crash back in a moment later into dense, droning, noisy ultradoom. Then all of a sudden from out of nowhere in the middle of the song, De Novissmis explode into furious blackened blasting, blastbeat drums and atonal grindcore whipped up into a violent sonic storm, and from there the song alternates between the plodding feedback-strewn blackdoom and epic murky crust, like Dystopia mixed with Grief, Christdriver and Khanate.

Packaged in a glossy jacket with rad artwork on both sides, and a couple of inserts. Black vinyl.