Review by Carl on July 13, 2023.

What a vile and nasty little surprise we have here. This is not the stuff I imagine when I think of the New Standard Elite label and their roster, but I have to admit that it's a nice fit nonetheless. In the band picture on the booklet I see these two guys, and I can easily picture them being the type of guys who spend their days eating Doritos and drinking cheap beer, blasting death metal and watching splatter movies, like a sort of brutal death metal Beavis & Butthead, and that is exactly how this EP sounds as well.

Listening to this has me thinking of a band like Enmity (but a lot less stupid) or else Brodequin and Guttural Secrete boiled down to their barest essence, but a certain Conqueror-gone-senile vibe is present too. The songs are short, with the main ingredients being phlegm-drenched gutturals, down-tuned chaotic riffing interspersed with primitive slams, a ploinking bass and percussion that alternates between frantic blasting and pounding stomp. The execution is at times pretty sloppy, with guitars and drums slightly losing track of each other here and there, and the overall sound being way more raw than usual in the style, yet still making it all work, oddly enough. This combination makes the music sound a lot more spontaneous as most other acts in the brutal death genre, giving proceedings a definite grindcore angle as well. The spoken samples don't bother me as much here for a change, because their depraved content is actually a perfect fit for the unhinged and unpolished music on offer. There are a couple of say-nothing tracks on here that I could have done without, but I'll let the demented atmosphere from this EP as a whole wash that blemish away for once.

This is one of those 'love it or loathe it' releases, and you can put me in that first category for sure. There are no frills, no subtle nuance, no polish or even an inkling of good taste present here, and I love it! Raw and demented, unhinged and disgusting, aggressive and bordering on being non-music, I simply can not help but smile at the insanity of it all. That this EP is over in some 15 minutes also helps, because I can imagine that a whole album of this could easily be too much, even for me.

This is only suited for those into the most aggressive, knuckle-dragging, demented extreme music out there, because this is simply a vile blast of caveman metal, purely designed for shock and awe only. Everyone else is excused for this one.

Rating: 8 out of 10