Following up their highly energetic and entertaining Wage Slave and Escalation of Hostility offerings, Texas grinders Kill The Client are back with three new tracks on a split with the shit-awful Agoraphobic Nosebleed.

The first half of the split is handled by Agoraphobic Nosebleed who suck their way through three tracks of obnoxiously shitty grindcore. If you’ve heard one Agoraphobic Nosebleed recording, you’ve heard them all and never want to hear them again. They have distortion set to the max and play simplistic grindcore backed by a poorly programmed drum machine with scream vocals. To be fair, this is honestly the best production I’ve heard on an Agoraphobic Nosebleed offering. I’m sure fans of the band will love this, but then again fans of this band also bathe in their own feces, so fuck those guys.

Since I hate Agoraphobic Nosebleed with a passion for inspiring a slew of shitty cybergrind bands, my only reason for purchasing this piece of vinyl was for Kill The Client’s half of the split. Their two previous recordings blew me away and I’ve been eagerly anticipating new material for more than 2 years!

Kill The Client’s half of the split clocks in at just under 5 minutes of early Napalm Death-inspired no frills grindcore. If you’ve heard their previous two recordings you know exactly what to expect from these Texan grinders; ear smash, blasting, guitar shredding, angry grindcore! What I wasn’t expecting from this effort was the incredibly poor production.

The three tracks they offer sound like they were recorded by a black metal producer in his mom’s basement with a Fisher Price tape deck. The distortion makes the guitar and drums sound like a swarm of angry bees attacking some poor bastard screaming like a lunatic in pain. Production values aside, the material they recorded is solid and in the same vein of the music on Wage Slave and Escalation of Hostility and, with a higher recording budget I’m sure it would have sounded a lot better.

The packaging of this effort is nice with really cool artwork by Florian Bertmer. Unfortunately, this split offering is a disappointment and while it’s something nice to look at, it’s all about the music and the poor production values, and completely shit Agoraphobic Nosebleed stinking up the first half of the release make this album more miss than hit. That said, I still greatly look forward to hearing a new full length offering by Kill The Client so long as they get a bigger recording budget than they had for this effort.

Review byTeufel