Drowned in Destruction:
NEGATIVE STANDARDS / WHITEHORSE
Split Review + Stream

They did it. The Bay Area’s finest neo-crust band – Negative Standards – and Australia’s most hideous sludge doom ordeal – Whitehorse  – have come together for a release so grand, dark and fucking devastating that it almost feels like the end of the world, and the most dystopian of fates has fucking time traveled or something and come back from the future to waste us on the spot and end our sorry existence right fucking now. What we love about this split is the diversity in sounds and musical approaches it offers and how it brings together two extremely unique and quite different bands to paint a much broader and more threatening sonic picture for us to look at as a total. Both bands are unique in their own – and sometimes opposite – ways, but combined by friendship, common intents and the purest of musical visions, they have paved the way to an absolutely annihilating release that from start to finish transcends the two souls that comprise it and just goes fucking beyond, way beyond.

 
The first half of the split is comprised of two Negative Standards songs, and to give you and idea of how versatile and unique this hardcore band is all you need to do is take a look at the song lengths. The first one is a ten minute behemoth in which crust, black metal, noise and doom all coalesce together in a devastating way to form a towering fucking sonic beast. In its ten excruciating minutes, the song titled XII switches genres on a dime, ripping back and forth between puzzling soundscapes of frightening post-industrial noise and a crushing and relentless crust-punk sonic clobbering, then suddenly switching shit up again in a swirl of madness and launching back into a mauling assault of crust-infested blackened doom within seconds. The next song – XIII – fucks with your senses even more, completing its evil mission in just little over two minutes, in which Negative Standards’ signature arsenal made of evolved hardcore and swampy crust literally bashes your ear drums in with a frightening hardcore attack.

Whitehorse, on the other hand, have stuck to what they know how to do best and once again have pulled it off like the masters that they are and always will be in this caustic world of theirs, and that means erecting an enormous fucking monolith of evil slime and then blowing life into it with their signature washes of noise, and finally unleashing this evil fucker on us like a rabid cataclysm. We’ll never get sick of listening to Pete’s sickening barks and how they crawl and morph and animate a senseless world where slime, brooding negativity and total destruction rule undisputed. Well, External Oblivion is exactly this, one single sickening journey into the uttermost depths of the slimiest shit-hole hell you could imagine. Everything in this song crawls, everything slithers and mostly, everything hates. Take the best moments of Corrupted and Moss, add a pinch of Kahante in there and a lot of Gnaw, Merzbow and Locrian, and there you have it, twelve minutes of triumphant fucking hellish noisy doom that will leave you crippled and depressed for days.

Vendetta has this evil split for sale right now on 12″ vinyl, and this is not only a triumphant pairing, it’s a statement in sonic annihilation that will improve your life by destroying it, and that means just one thing: get your hands on a copy of this right fucking now, or die trying.