Ten songs packed onto a single ten-minute 7"? You know this is going to be fast, brutal stuff, and Dead In The Dirt deliver stupendously with this debut Ep on Southern Lord. These Southern upstarts (hailing from Atlanta) play brutal blasting blackened hardcore, a sound that I've been hearing a lot from this label lately, but fuck it - I really can't get tired of this kind of stuff. In Dead In The Dirt's case, it's a mix of barbaric d-beat driven crustcore, primitive death metal and early black metal done very well, served up in minute-long doses of unbridled violence with crushing Frostian riffage comes bulldozing out of 500 mph blastbeat whirlwinds, chaotic tremolo riffs and guitars smeared with gore, bone fragments, and a weird processed tone that give the riffs an added layer of grime on top of their Napalm Death-strength chug. Their rhythm section sounds MASSIVE, contributing a huge low-end undertow beneath DITD's churning blackened grindcrust, and whenever the band dives into one of their slower chugging breakdowns (which happens a lot), it's devastating. They've also got that classic crust two-singer lineup with vocalists Blake Connelly and Bo Orr, one guy offering deep death-metal style guttural roars while the other trades off with insane high-pitched screams, which adds to the whole Napalm Death / Extreme Noise Bastard / Hellbastard vibe but with more of a bottom-heavy, gnarled death metal edge. There's also a cover of the song "Skin Graft" that was originally written by 90's Canadian blastcore heroes Left For Dead, and DITD give it a wicked metallic spin on their version. If you're into the charred, dire hardcore practiced by bands like Nails, Trap Them, All Pigs Must Die, Masakari, Black Breath and His Hero Is Gone, this is definitely recommended...