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Comeback Kid is doing the dual reach out. Everything here just screams goody goody GOODY for fans of vibrant, energetic, pumped up hardcore. Good fun but good and pissed off, righteous anger with a message of victory (pun intended?) - this is get the fuck out of the way music. 

Whiskey raw melodies collide with metal-hardcore aggression and sheer rock musculature. Grooves slam bang across the skull with punishing lack of mercy. Dyanamics slide across the board with mid-tempo chunk riff hitting and thrashy pummeling, just depending on what mood The Showdown is in on any given track.

Satanic Warmaster returns from the void for "Nachzerer" - dirty grungy sicky sicky sicky shit this. Nasty production, dense with distortion, gruesomely melodic tunes, vicious vocals sure to rip you open from the inside out, churning raging forward motion, crunch and bang, speed and demons and 2+2=666 and all that stuff. Old school black metal summonings from beyond the grave, from beyond Sheol, from beyond Gehenna, from beyond Hell and Tartarus, from beyond the Cthuluan void - this is the deepest realm of Satan's beautiful assful of music. Glass in your pudding, eat it and bleed and die and come back again as a zombie in the Warmaster's horde. Oh fuck right!

Street Dogs make melodilicious but rocking and punky and OI-filled with some nice Irish punk flavors lashing out in vibrant, vivacious, excited, happy-punchy punk rock rock rock. The energy is endless and the emotiveness is all over the place without sacrificing the requisite testosterone. Street Dogs have definitely found their own flavor of rawk and roll yo, driving grooves, warm guitars and passionate vocals. It's almost - uplifting? Sure, why not? Punk has always been about self-empowerment, so why the fuck not buddy? I don't see why not. You shouldn't see why not, either. In fact, you should see this album. Or hear it. You get the gist.

Devil's Brigade unleashes its self-titled debut. Rancid man Matt Freeman rocks out with the kind of raw but melodicized punk rock raucousness his Rancid-heads have come to expect. Now he's got another outlet to explore his unique brand of punk. Nothing wrong with Rancid, mind you, but it's nice to see his dynamic rock habits take a new tweak. And there's variety galore. The songwriting is textured and frequently surprising with the little jaunts hither and thither it takes on its way to moshing you into a sweating mass of holy fuck. Punk-surf-oi-ska-and-more - the influences range wide and free but all within the umbrella of pure Freeman madness.

October Falls is a brilliant example of epic black metal. With three tracks filling up this album, you know a there and back again journey a la black metal is on its way to you. Progressive diversity and time-stretched-out shifts and segues from forward-driven black metal to DSBM ambience and back again (see? back again!) carry the listener across a thick but balanced production of melodic, moody and beautifully abrasive (sandpaper mixed with that which is gorgeous) slab of monolithic black metal.

These two bands are PERFECTLY matched for this split CD. Each artist definitely brings its own take to the ambient/depressive-suicidal black metal music scheme, but the segue from one band to the next is organic and hypnotically delirious in total execution.

Hardcore and metal meet up in a melodic slaughterhouse of spirituality via mathy and semi-prog heaviness. Chunky riffs with thoughtful progressions and dark but hopeful expressions of faith all mingle in an aesthetically broad-minded but musically and conceptually focused slab of music that truly makes a journey for the listener.

From bleak ambient metal to noisy mid-tempo black metal of controlled spaz (so it seems), Jumalhämärä sends the listener tripping at this Neurosis vibe meets BM grimness. A truly original act, Jumalhämärä elevates the black metal genre to a new way of viewing progressive metal.

Encoffination is a malefic behemoth of apocalypse. Doom is coming your way and bringing with it death. All this is a fancy way of saying that "Ritual Ascension Beyond Flesh" is a bignasty batch of doom-death metal that runs like a glacier at you, like a serial killer that walks but catches up with you to slaughter you anyway.