Impressive skull-flattening heaviness from two newer doom merchants, Whitehorse and Batillus. They both bring new, exclusive material to this split Lp, and the slow-motion power that the bands bring to this slab is pulverizing.

The crushing experimental sludge of New York's Batillus's begins with "Silver Mortar", a nearly ten minute death-dirge that begins with sheets of delicate black drift and eerie guitars creeping over a steady slowcore rhythm. This brooding intro gradually builds the tension, the bass adding a slight jazzy feel to the band's shuffling gloom, but its not long before they crash in suddenly with the doom. A monstrous down tuned riff in slow motion, putrid death metal-style bellowing itself seemingly stuck in sap, a gluey, vaguely psychedelic doomdeath crush draped in whirring synthesizers and gleaming black drones. It abruptly launches into a weird, angular passage of progged-out sludge that reminds me of Man Is The Bastard, something that recurs a couple of times throughout the song, alternating with some more deformed doom riffage splattered with processed guitar noise. The other song "Feral" gets even more abject and anguished, stumbling and crawling through vicious snarling vokills and tar-drenched riffs, those Hawkwindian synths buzzing and blooping off in the distance, sounding like some space-rock obsessed version of Trees or Khanate.

Australia's Whitehorse have just one song on their side, but its a fuckin' epic. "Dark Age" drops a simple, crushing riff in the middle of a cloud of dark industrial ambience, clanking metal and billowing black drift swirling around some vast subterranean chamber, and as the rest of the band slowly enters with the slow buildup of pounding drums, the song lurches forward into an ultra-heavy deathdoom assault. Ghastly guttural vocals are unintelligible smears of putrescence against the thick reverb that cloaks the band, while the chugging lockstep groove of the guitars and rhythm section flatten everything in sight. If you've heard these guys before, you know Whitehorse is one of the heaviest doom metal bands around, taking the classic graveyard sludge of Autopsy, Asphyx, Disembowelment and Cianide and dragging it even deeper into the mire and injecting an unhealthy level of filthy electronic skuzz and trippy effects into the sludge. The song shifts into spaced-out, dub-drenched delirium later on, but when it comes out on the other side the band changes up into an all new battery of savage riffery laced with moments of chaotic blackened blasting and frenzied animalistic shrieks.

Recommended to fans of either band, and to anyone into extreme, electronically-infected ultra-doom. Comes with a printed inner sleeve, and pressed on black vinyl.