LAKKA / SAMORAST split Tape

The Lakka side starts furiously with “Support Your Local Hero” blast-beating its way to a screamo-like bombastic mid-section and taking it home with blackened guitar tremolos. The dark textures, the brutal vocals, the scrappy live feel, it’s all there. I love it when bands mainly in the crust punk vein stray from the tropes of the genre to include other elements of extreme music, or just music in general, and Lakka do just that. Sure it may be mainly screamo and powerviolence, but that’s good, right? The sparse subtle melodies of “Posledi dech”, the machine gun stop-start rhythm attacks of “Too normal to be strong” and ending a blistering neocrust assault with an acoustic guitar outro, all help give Lakka their own identity.

Samorast start their side with an atmospheric track, layering and layering snippets of conversation until a swelling, distorted noise engulfs the piece, building until the first track proper kicks in. Samorast have a lot more space in their sound in comparison to the other side of this split, with much cleaner instrumentation allowing each element to be easily identified. That’s not to say it’s easy listening, they do well to make their restrained sonics hit so hard, the drumming in particular is incredibly complex, battering and quite unpredictable in the way it switches rhythms and catches you off guard, melding the simple and the radically unorthodox. Samorast do a good job throughout the record of building and building in intensity to their final climax, a stance that trusts the patience of the listener, knowing it will pay off for them if they stay tuned.