Swollen with Rancid Phlegm

Mucous Fangs opens this putrid, foul-smelling split. Like most of the other tracks on the Cryptic Brood side, it moves in fits and starts at first. Drums and guitar lurch through a few staggering notes, punctuated by long, feedback-drenched pauses. Then it’s guitar and bass--then just guitar--before the whole band finally slithers together into a sickening groove. The way the band starts out disjointed and gradually comes together is like an undead, dismembered body reassembling itself--limbs crawling and twitching and fusing together. This is truly some rotten, stinking, corpse metal right here.

Once all the nasty parts ooze into place, the band shambles through nauseatingly rotten riffs that repeatedly slow to a halt before jolting back to life again. The way this band fucks with the tempo is the secret to everything that makes their side of the split so incredible. Not since Eyehategod have I encountered a band this good at making the beat stagger and lurch.

The vocals are another major contributing factor here. By constantly alternating between deep, menacing growls and psychotic screams, the vocals manage to add an almost theatrical element to the songs. The best example is Horrid Stench: easily one of the best songs I’ve heard all year. The screamed vocals come in with so much conviction, you can just picture the singer being devoured alive--or at least driven insane--by the undead horrors he seems to be witnessing.

I have much less to say about the Night Hag side, only because it suffers by comparison. Night Hag are very good at what they do, and very putrid and rotten-sounding in their own way. If you love buzzsaw guitars and distorted bass, you might even prefer this side. When the bass and guitar come in together on some of these tracks, it really does hit like a ton of bricks. The two shorter tracks on this side are mostly composed of braindead, zombie riffs, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. If Cryptic Brood sounds like a self-devouring, reanimating corpse that cannot die, Night Hag sounds more like a mindless, proto-human killing machine dredged up from the primeval swamp.

The Night Hag side ends with an eleven-minute track that pushes farther into death/doom territory, even incorporating some very nice melodic passages in the middle. It overstays its welcome, though, sometime around the eight-minute mark. At that point, due to too many repetitions of the same riffs, the track just becomes boring.

There have been a lot of positive responses to Cryptic Brood’s last full-length, Outcome of Obnoxious Science. If you liked that album, all I can say is: do not skip this split. In some ways, it sees Cryptic Brood venturing into even filthier, smellier territory than before. All things considered, I think the Night Hag side should win that band some new fans as well.