Iron Lung / Lana Dagales
Split
Boredom Noise
This is a really great split between two solid underground grindcore bands, both of them pretty unknown but very talented and unique-sounding. Iron Lung is a guitar/drums duo from Reno who like to punk up their songs and hammer their point home, as these eight sharp and pummeling tracks demonstrate. Their subject matter is pretty morbid and gore-like, detailing surgical removal and death on songs like “Cervical Laser,” “Horizontal Respiration” and “Scanoptic.” The result is genuinely scary at times, like “Nails”: “100,000 degrees of intense heat concentrated on a small facet of metal (Let it be iron) / Is more than ample supply needed to liquefy / Then mold it into nails being hammered into your coffin.”
Lana Dagales from Oakland, CA is even better to these ears. This bass/drum-toting duo has been around since 1998, but this is only their second album yet, and it’s absolutely huge, wonderful stuff. They rage through 12 tracks in their allotted half of this 14-minutes (total) split, and the music buzzes with frenzy; it’s angry and astounding, massive and miserable. All tracks bleed into each other, making this sound like one huge grindcore feast. It’s daring, challenging and brutal, and it makes for some surprisingly beautiful and accomplished listening. It is certainly one of this year’s most exciting and devastating hardcore performances caught on tape.
Boredom Noise: http://www.boredomnoise.com/
