Taste Of Fear have long been a favorite of mine, one of the few bands that's been able to channel the rabid barking blastcore of Infest and does it with the same level of anger and power and stripped-down aggression. Their Discography 1991-2003 is an essential collection of the band's ultra-brutal metallic powerviolence. Haven't heard anything from them in years and it looked like the band was hanging it up for good after more than a decade of extreme blasting, but longtime C-Blast buddy and Taste Of Fear guitarist Justin Rowand popped his head up recently and let us know about a split CD-R that had just come out on a tiny label called Lifeless Mind, which featured not only a bunch of killer blackened thrash/noise jams from a new band called The Communion, but seven older Taste Of Fear tracks that have been out of print for years.

Packaged in a black blank digipack with artwork pasted onto the front, back and inside panels, the Taste Of Fear/The COmmunion split features seven songs from the former, four from the latter, with a total of forty-two minutes of music. However, over half of that is a massive twenty-four minute power electronics/harsh noise piece from The Communion, which I'll get to in a minute.

The Taste Of Fear tracks include the three songs from the split 7" with Evolved To Obliteration from 1995, an unreleased studio track from '95, and the three tracks from the split 7" with Unholy Grave that came out back in 1999. All of these tracks appeared on the Discography 1991-2003 cd, but since that disc is now out-of-print, this is the only place you can find these tracks together. By this point in Taste Of Fear's career, singer Daryl Kahan (formerly of legendary NY hardcore band Citizens Arrest) was so immersed in the black metal and death metal scene that he and the rest of the members brought some of that noxious stench to their raging Infest-inspired thrashcore, which produced tracks like "Dominion" and "Paths Of Pain" that come off like amalgams of Infest, D-beat driven crust, atavistic deathdoom and early blackened death metal like Beherit and Darkthrone (complete with seriously fucked up echo-crazed vocals) and smeared with thick gobs of distortion and noise and even throwing in some spooky synth intros and outros. This stuff kills!

The Communion are friends of Taste Of Fear that are making one of their first appearances on this split. Based on the music they've contributed to this disc, these guys are pretty promising; they're obviously influenced not just by the violent underground sounds of early hardcore and black metal and grind, but also old-school industrial and power electronics, and they bring it all together in a ferocious sonic assault. The COmmunion take furious fucked-up modulated electronic noise and super fast hardcore thrash and black metal and grindcore and mash it all together into intense and BRUTAL songs of blackened thrashcore. The three thrashers that are included here are "Jester Axis", "Cult Machine", and "Crib Death Foghorn", all fast and fierce, blistering blastbeat driven chaos turning into lurching punk rock, primitive black metal like riffing suddenly stumbling into noxious slow-motion swamp sludge, their sound steeped in nihilism and negativity, like some ragged mix of Darkthrone and Discharge and Eyehategod, with fucking KILLER whacked out guitar solos and sick sneering vocals. But after those three tracks, The Communion descends into a massive twenty-four minute noisescape of looped abstract riffs, harsh PE- style vocals and malfunctioning electronics, and it's a hard slog that'll surely scare off anyone without a lust for horrific industrial noise. Me, I fucking loved it. Can't wait to hear more from these guys!

Packaged in a handassembled digipack, and limited to 200 copies.