ninehertz

You’ve got to love a split release from two unknown random bands that you happen across and end up following both from that day onwards. This is Sick Fawn and Man, the Robot, both seemingly slightly on the various oddball axes of grind, sludge and noise.

Sick Fawn are up first, from the home state of Cavity and Mickey Mouse, self-describing as “two dudes… playing heavy music slow and fast”. Audacity opens, strange and bassy, making for weirdo noise rock with a sludge fixation. I’m not even sure what’s going on during The Great Vibrator – like the best two-pieces they don’t try and cover for their reduced membership but embrace it, harness it to create output of warped strangeness. There are lovely rolling riffs and grind vocals and all manner of other elements in the remainder of their side.

Man, the Robot are from Texas (I’ve written myself into an obligatory hole now – “home of The Sword and the Alamo”?) and I have similarly little foresight into what to expect before their side begins. What arrives, in the form of the beautifully titled Interior Defecator is mega aggro grindcore blasts of sonic mania – and that's good for me. The follow up has an even funnier and bitter title – You Never Wanted to Buy Me Flowers (My Enemies are Like Bees that Surround Me – and after a standard attack opening, vocals that are absolutely feral, and a squawking guitar, arrives a rhythm that's practically danceable, despite the chaos it sits within. Their final track is more slightly odd grind, slowing as if falling into sludge pits.

The best thing about this split is how both bands have an undercurrent of the unhinged in their approach and a nice warm feeling thinking that they’ve managed to find each other and share their novel and untethered expressions of grind and sludge.