Sunday Sesh: Show Us Your Splits
2016 has been an absolutely killer year for splits. Today we’re boasting about our limberness and talking shared releases. Grab your Bandcamp links and dive in.
There have been a ton of splits that have earned high marks in the book of W. Swallow Matewan, Torrid Husk and End‘s declaration of desolation, has been one of my favorite releases this year. Deterministic Chaos/Green Metal by Oskoreien and Botanist has been a surprise delight. What’s currently kicking the crap out of me though is this radical bifurcation cleaved by Ghoulgotha and Ruin. The name is Churning in Vertebraes/Becoming Disease. Remember it, for it will be your undoing.
Both of these Blood Harvest luminaries spread the old school disease with necromantic fervor, but in a scene awash in corpse-bloated imitators, this 7″ stands tall. The peculiarity of this particular tomb is due in no small part to the uniqueness of each side of the split. Although Ghoulgotha build their ziggurat upon the back of a fairly expected (albeit absolutely rocking) death riff, the band does so with an insidiously shoddy masonry. “Churning in Vertebraes” judders and shakes like a newly reanimated cadaver unsure upon its diseased footing. As the riff snarls and billows with funereal malice, the rhythm section twists and stumbles; the end result is disorientation and blight. Ghoulgotha ensnare you in a sepulchral fog and chase you with studdering step until the light runs out. There is no escape.
Ruin’s contribution to the split is no less violent. The opening invocation of “Becoming Disease” is a ghastly chorus of tortured shrieks that succumbs to one of the gnarliest death-doom riffs you’ll hear all year. As the war drums sound the death march, Ruin’s vocalist croaks with a black tongue forbidden in these lands, for it causes insanity and torment unending. “Becoming Disease” doesn’t quite have the zombie spring in its step that “Churning in Vertebraes” boasts, but the boiling swamp water riffs are even gnarlier. Both bands approach OSDM from a slightly different angle, and our sarcophagi are all the richer for it.
So, what splits have you been enjoying this year? Let me know in the comments below!
Cover photo VIA. You can order Churning in Vertebraes/Becoming Disease here. Say hi to the necromancers on Facebook here.
