Dodsferd's
Suicide and the Rest of Your Kind Will Follow was a masterpiece of moody, hostile black metal -- its two side-long tracks crushed the listener with relentless riffing and shrieking, hate-filled vocals. His contributions to this split EP aren't, unfortunately, quite as pathbreaking. He offers three songs, all in the four- to six-minute range. The most interesting is "Another Two of Your Scars…," on which his hellish bark is contrasted with a clean, higher male voice that sounds genuinely agonized; without paying attention to the lyrics, it comes across like a recording of a torture session, with
Dodsferd as interrogator and an unidentified victim. "You Called It Resurrection…," which finishes off
Dodsferd's half of the album, is one of the most deliberately primitive hunks of black metal to be released in some time. The vocals are so reverbed-out they sound like he's shouting from inside an empty rooftop water-tank, and the drums are nothing but a fuzzy blur, blending seamlessly into the guitars. And this goes on for nearly seven minutes. At the end, it's revealed that the track was recorded live, as two or three people clap. Mortovatis is the one delivering an epic poem of misanthropy this time out; "Rebirth 349" is a 20-minute track that might as well be instrumental, since his vocals are so guttural and buried in the mix that they just sound like bass distortion. The primary sound of interest is a high-pitched squeal that could be a synth or a guitar pedal; in any case, this is almost like a black metal version of
Chrome, and the primary reason to hear this split. ~ Phil Freeman