One ugly trunk find, an oplder (2012 ) that's sold out from the source. Ovo? Oh man, I've been ranting about that Italian duo since time immemorial- their increasingly complicated and art-damaged electro-acoustic sludge rock has been battering my skull for years, a longtime favorite around here for sure. They;ve been sort of comapred to a mixture of Diamanda Galas and Swans, but if you seem live, oof, it's substantially more bizarre than even those guidposts might suggest. But Smut? They're a new one to me. And man do they kill. Just a duo with one guy on drums and vocals, the other guitar and vocals, their side pops off like a grenade, sending shrapnel of Midwestern noisecore mixed in with some brutal Negative Approach-style hardcore brutishiness in every direction. There's a weird in-crowd sense of humor that Smut smears all over their stuff too, with weird song titles like "Books (used to be) my life", Big business can suck it" ( not sure if that's directed at the band or the commercial presence), and "Rock the prostate". It's pretty fun though, one-thousand mile per hour quasi-improvised blurrcore with some of the brattiest shrieks I've heard lately, the songs occasionally sharpening into a kickass three-chord riff that shears your head off before the rest of the band goes kablooey again, or even more oddly, lurching into this brief surrealistic slop that almost evokes the puerile horror of Happy Flowers .

As expected, Stefania Pedretti & Bruno Dorella from Ovo give me the total creeps when it flips over to their side, the (relatively) lenghtier ghoul-drone skronk of "Canaglia" rising up in a mess of slowly waving limbs and Stefania's shapeshifting voices, moving from hushed incantory whisper to blood-curdling goblin-snarl, the music stripped down to the real bare bones of the unit, just drums, guitar and vocals, but with the delay / echo effects cranked up on seemingly everything. The song never does tumble over into the kind of maniacal free-form "doom" that Ovo often assault you with, this piece going for a more atmopsheric, never-rattling vibe that works nicely.

Looking at the inserts , it seems like all of the stuff for this split had been recorded all the way back in 2005 and took awhile to emerge on wax, but time did not mellow this ear-splitting racket one iota. Dunno what the holdup was, but the finished project is a creeper, jammed with hideous punk-noise extemism, images of severe deformity, and a xerox of a break-up letter.