This one is for beatdown fanatics only! If breakdowns, guttural vocals, double bass, metal and even more breakdowns ain’t your thing, there’s a big chance you won’t dig what’s offered here. But if you can appreciate the heavy side of hardcore, you should give this 3-way split a listen. What we get is 3 bands from all over the Europe – Bloodstained form Poland, Envy from Bulgaria and Crawling Ground from France. Basically, all the bands put a focus on heaviness. The first three songs are from the band Envy. They blend together many elements fro m metal and hardcore to create some really sick and brutal sound. The vocals are low end death metal growl. Coming next are Bloodstained. They seem to pick up the pace a little, but the tempo is still largely mid-paced. They also fall right on that line between death metal and hardcore. Band keeps it hardcore but get heavy with lots of metal elements. Intense drumming with good use of double bass and complex song structures make it very enjoyable. Last in line is Crawling Ground. Their style of beatdown hardcore is very tight & highly aggressive. They have some really good grooves in the music and seems to be the most typical hardcore oriented on this CD. They use breakdowns a lot but still like to change tempo from time to time and speed thing up.
Basically, except for Bloodstained, this is the first time I'm hearing these bands and I am quite impressed. Even thought they all seem to sound similar, each band on this CD holds their own and do something interesting with beatdown sound.
