If you've never heard the early Black Dice recordings and only know the band from their albums Beaches And Canyons or their more recent offerings on Paw Tracks, boy are you ever in for a surprise. Before these Rhode Island art school grads started flexing their inner Eno and began experimenting with electronic textures and krautrock-inspired soundforms, they carved out big bloody chunks of berserk avant-hardcore thrash that sounded a whole hell of a lot like Void immersed in ear-wrecking bursts of harsh noise, a raucous and violent assault of sludgy hardcore, blown out to oblivion, ultra noisy and chaotic, and completely fucked and insane sounding. Black Dice never sounded more psychotic than on their very first self-titled 7" on Gravity Records from 1998, a six song beating of filthy chaos and feedback-soiled thrash that includes the noxious hardcore dirge of "Lambs Like Fruit", "Synapse Synapse" gnarled mid-paced thrash and the angular noise freak-out of "To The Lions". On the b-side, we get the bestial noise-punk of "Narcissus & Echo", the disintegrating, collapsing thrash of "New Design", and the tribal drumming and volleys of acidic guitar noise and gargling vox and messed up riffs of "Rereading". The songs are barely two minutes long, riffs falling apart, drumming so chaotic that it seems as if the entire drum kit is about to fly apart, the band barely keeping in time with one another. Packaged in a full color jacket with a glossy insert, this EP is one of the most scathing fucked-up hardcore records of the late 90's in my opinion - highly recommended.