It sucks that San Francisco weirdoes Abscess recently called it quits after almost two decades of delivering their quirky stoner death, but some new material has still oozed out in the wake of their exit, like this slammin' split LP with fellow Cali grinders Population Reduction. The Abscess side of this record serves up eight new tracks of their blistering acid death from these underground vets/Autopsy members, nothing quite as wonky as what I heard on their phenomenal final album Dawn of Inhumanity, but still plenty warped, songs like "Nausea Without End", "Bourbon, Blood and Butchery", "Volcanic Psychosis" and "Senseless Waste of Space" grinding out putrid blasts of sticky, sickly dissonant death metal slime, punky thrash, Sabbathy riffing and those weird forays into a kind of noxious stoner rock grooviness that has been one of their trademarks since the beginning, and there's a very strange detour into the Pepto-Bismol jingle that briefly appears at the end. Abscess fuse together an old school death metal assault with hardcore punk and a subliminal psych influences and it's a style all of their own that I'm definitely going to miss, but these songs make their passing much easier to bear.

Also comforting is the presence of their pals Population Reduction on the b-side, a two-piece band that makes a great showing here with seven songs of awesome thrash-infected grindcore that sounds to me like a perfect hybrid of late 80's Bay Area thrash metal and the monstrous cacophonic whirlwind of the early Earache roster. I've heard a bunch of other bands try to pull this sort of thing off before, but I don't think that anyone has mixed the two influences together as well as Population Reduction does here. Manic growling vokills rip through the speed-demon blastscapes of "Cannabis Holocaust" and "In with the Old, Out with the Cold", puking up the venomous tongue-in-cheek lyrics over arrangements that flow between ripping thrash metal and guttural atavistic death/grind, with the guitarists laying down a couple of shredding harmonized leads and some of the songs lurching through unpredictable stop-start seizures. One of the highlights of their side is "Cult Scam" which drops the most pit-inducing thrash riffs on the whole record into the middle of the song, and they wrap things up with a cover of "In Nephritic Blue" from Spanish death metallers Haemorrhage.

The record has Abscess's Chris Reifert doing the bizarre alien artwork featured on the jacket (I always love to see his stuff), and it's released in a limited edition of five hundred copies.