Warfare Noise

Oddly, I'm going to start this review by talking about the production, as there are multiple acts on this release, and I would rather talk about a general aspect of this album before describing each band and their material individually. Firstly, the production is better than all of these bands' prior demos, but it is still very noise-heavy and sounds very compressed compared to their eventual full-length albums.

I understand that Cogumelo probably had a limited budget and these recordings were rushed but, as I stated in my Black Vomit review, this makes the split pretty redundant, considering all of these songs have massively improved versions that exist. Despite this, the music on this release really is great, so I'm going to talk about them in tracklist order, starting with Chakal.

Chakal is one of the more impressive acts on this split. The riffs in Cursed Cross and Mr Jesus Christ are evocative and technical, and the solos are exceptional. With Chakal being a relatively progressive band, these songs are of course much longer than the other songs on the split, and contain a lot of time changes and bouncy, memorable riffs. Korg's voice is great, with his hoarse, high-pitched croaks, and the playing is overall tight.

Mutilator is probably the weakest band on this release, although the music is still good, it is very monotonous, and though I would argue they have the heaviest songs on Warfare Noise, the tracks sadly are not very memorable, as the frantic drums and guitars mesh into a wall of noise, and the vocals sound quite tired. Although the riffs are good and similar to Chakal's material in that they represent the early black metal sound well, and mix it with aggressive brutal thrash metal, the I think the songs could've been performed much better.

Sarcofagó's songs on here are iconic, The Black Vomit in particular stands out as a predecessor of the I.N.R.I. album, whereas Satanas would be included on that record. This is classic Sarcofagó, the songs are mayhemic and feature plenty of shrieks and tremolo-picking. Though the lead guitar work is underwhelming, the musicianship is adequate, and a huge improvement from the demo.

Finally, Holocausto ends the split with complete bedlam. They are the most evil-sounding band on Warfare Noise, the vocalist's low growls compliment the music very well, and although all of these bands sound very similar with proto-black blast beats and heavy riffing, Holocausto is especially demented, as their riffs are dissonant and chuggy.

This split is legendary in the acts that performed on it, and the music is great, although you can find better versions of most of these songs, as I stated earlier, which dates the split quite a lot, but this is a definite must-listen for newcomers to this style of black/thrash metal, and may be a good introduction to all 4 bands.