What do you get when you throw together a bunch of drunkards, cannibals, and the Marquis de Sade into an epic bar fight? You’d get Split Your Guts Vol. 1, the split cd between the UK’s Gorerotted, Spain’s Gruesome Stuff Relish, and France’s Gronibard. The split is a mixed bag, containing some seriously lackluster material, but two of the three acts involved manage to save the split from amounting to a forgettable experience.

If you guessed the offending party to be Gorerotted, you’d be dead-on accurate. My first exposure to these overrated chucklefucks was on their Only Tools and Corpses album, possibly one of the most overrated pieces of goregrind to ever be reviewed. I remember hearing some good things about these blokes in Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles and I picked up their album on a blind whim. What I got was the shittiest burpy vocals in the history of extreme metal, sloppy, uninventive goregrind candy coated with clean production that was way out of its league, and a menstrual frosting layer of Oi vocal parts. Aye chi wow wow! Fortunately, Gorerotted did not bring their retarded Oi punk cousin along on this family gathering, but never the less the material still sucks. To give them some line of credit, the filth is more tolerable this time around (that’s not saying much though) and "Carrion Smelling" has a few decent catchy riffs that appeal to the more melodic thrash fans out there. When their side ends, however, the opening riffs of Gruesome Stuff Relish will be like the pearly gates of Heaven opening up.

And- like clockwork- Gruesome Stuff Relish delivers. This material here is definitely stronger than their split with Splatterhouse and I’d say on par with their material on Teenage Giallo Grind. Imagine Carcass but replace Jeff Walker, Bill Steer, and Ken Owens with Return of the Living Dead-style zombified versions of themselves. It’s brutal, it’s sloppy, it’s catchy, and by George, it’s ready to motherfucking party. As to be expected from Gruesome Stuff Relish, their material on Split Your Guts Vol. 1 is pure, addictive goregrind heaven. While it definitely is formulaic, there is no denying Gruesome Stuff Relish’s ability to craft good Carcass-styled goregrind.

Then there is Gronibard. Is there any other band that on other releases can compose a song with kazoo sound effects, barking, and do a semi-acoustic EP dedicated to and entirely inspired by Vin Diesel effectively? I think not. And true to their form, Gronibard gets down with their dirty, homosexual selves and slaps the listener silly like a PCP-charged reject Warner Bros. cartoon character. Undeniably there is a groove to Gronibard’s grind that allows me to picture their porngrind being used for choreography by some demented metal cheerleading squad, the competitive kind that gets on ESPN. Just imagine the kind of movie that Bring It On would have been if it was based entirely around a soundtrack provided by Gronibard! It would possibly be the greatest porno ever achieved! Just imagine the screams of Anal Capone over the rhythmic strutting of Kirsten Dunst and the drum work on "Viens la suce ma bite" providing the background noise to acrobatic, mid-air fuckfests! Top that off with their superior cover of Rotten Sound’s "Stages" and you have a classic! Now if only I knew French…

Overall, the split is definitely worth a look. Gorerotted sucks ass and you can skip through their portion entirely, but they’re only 3 measly songs and won’t detract too much from the joy that is Gronibard and Gruesome Stuff Relish.

Written By: Necro-tron