An international effort this one, in terms of both the bands and the labels. In Europe this has been released by Monotonstudio, and in the US by Tokyo Fist.
Helen of Troy follow up their excellent EP here with two more songs of their emo stylings. They have an interesting knack of throwing in spacey breakdowns with ambient effects amidst the turbulent hardcore and screamo vocals. The first song starts off at full pelt with harsh screaming and dynamite guitar before slowing down and switching to spoken vocals. Then it falls back into a thundering groove and blistering screams. Wow. Really effective. The hardcore parts are kinda like Yaphet Kotto, but with harsher vocals all the way through. The spoken word and melodic breaks add for nice variation. Helen of Troy are one of my favourite bands doing this sort of thing at the moment, I want to hear them do an LP, dammit!
OK, on the other side we have Kobra Khan, who are not American. I can’t find any insert in here to tell me where they are from. I probably should look on the 10″ they did a while back. Anyway, they play mad harsh screamo that has a large amount of Orchid-ity fused with a bit of the French style emo. Lots of groove and mosh parts to get your muscles aching to. Three songs. Nothing you ain’t heard before, but they do this thing really well.
Good solid split goin’ on here, and HoT really make this worth picking up if you are into the style they do and Kobra Khan are a good listen for folks who love a bit of throbbin’ screamo.