Irish hardcore / sludgecrust thugs Drainland follow up their Southern Lord Cd collection And So Our Troubles Began from last year with this new split Lp with another emerald isle band called Trenches. On their side, Drainland deliver three new songs collectively sub-titled "The Abduction Diary". Beginning with eerie warbling notes rising off of an ancient dust-covered Wurlitzer organ, the band slowly builds a morbid atmosphere that leads into the monstrous lurching evil of "Stairs", a tale of imprisonment and subjugation told through the bludgeoning sludgecore assault that the band violently hammers down, suddenly veering from noisy, putrid dirge to spastic, near grind-levels of speed and ferocity. The song travels through strange dissonant melodies and more quirky, off-time tarpit crush, an Am Rep infested blast of vile hardcore that segues into the blastbeat riddled horror of "Parallel Venoms", where they finally lock into a massive grueling blooze-soaked groove. By the end of the side, Drainland finally move into the crawling doom of the last song, a glacial downtuned plod that explodes into a final assault of speedy downtuned hardcore thrash, then into a stretch of industrial noise, sheets of minimal factory hum, and nearly blackened chiming guitars crawling over the last several minutes of the side, a climax of swirling chaos. Filthy and negative, violent low-end HC brutality - these guys are better than most at assimilating various extreme hardcore/metal sounds (powerviolence, doom metal, hardcore) without sounding slapdash.

Trenches counter with a single song called "Vaccine", a sprawling fourteen minute piece that moves from eerie clean guitars and spacious instrumental rock into massive leaden metallic dirge that develops into a crushing Sabbathain groove with harsh ripped-throat screams. It winds through a constant changing landscape of mathy metallic skronk and blackened sludge hintng at the combined influence of Neurosis, Cavity, the violent chaos of the Bremen metalcore scene, and the extreme fringes of doom metal. Pretty cool, never heard 'em before this but I'm duly impressed...

Limited to five hundred copies.