We love digital grindcore, but there's really only a few bands that pull off the combo of electronic blastbeats and metallic guitars well. Like our very own Genghis Tron, who bring so many weird and melodic elements to their mutant grindcore programming (and who have pretty much ended up evolving beyond the "grindcore" tag altogether at this point). Or drum-machine grindcore gods Agoraphobic Nosebleed, who were essentially the band that shaped the genre. Or Dataclast (who also released stuff on Crucial Blast...I wasn't kidding when I said we love digital grind!), who splattered their punky Carcass worship with glitchy IDM-isms and avant-electronica cut-up. Well, you can add this French band to the list, as Fantastikol Hole has delivered some of the best electronic grind we've ever heard on The Mathematikol Oil. Thoroughly weird, crushingly heavy, The Fantastikol Hole combine super-heavy death metal guitars, razor sharp machine beats and IDM, bestial vocals, massive deathcore breakdowns, and bizarre, avant garde structures. At times, yeah, we're reminded of Genghis Tron, but where Genghis Tron blends melodic electro blissouts to punishing metalcore freakout, The Fantastikol Hole splices together a brutal hybrid of death n' roll and art-damaged European metalcore with glitchy, Autechre style electronica, post-industrial heaviness, and dissonant noise. It's like a super heavy mashup of Converge, Entombed, Genghis Tron, Autechre, Pig Destroyer, Godflesh, Voivod, and Pan Sonic, reconstituted into a malevolent, fretboard-shredding, fractured grind cyborg. All of the 27 songs clock in at under 2 minutes in length, and despite the crazed energy and experimental forms these guys delve into, there's lots of catchy hooks and cool electronic abstraction and some KILLER production tricks... like the frequency dropout and subsequent electro-death n' roll riff on "Rock And Die, Suffer And Roll" that simply fucking kills. Or the totally sci-fi, psychedelic electronics on "Want To See, Why To Be". Really cool. So obviously, we're recommending this CD to anyone into the whole digital grind sound, and those of you that dig the really fucked cut-up death metal stuff, Faxed Head, Naked City, and other extremely crazed, heavy, experimental takes on death/grind would probably be into this as well.