It pains me to say that. Honestly. I had HUGE expectations for this split when it was first announced. Two titans of hardcore, coming together, on one slab of wax. It sounded fucking awesome! Slowly but surely, more and more details about the split were announced, and I think the point where I started to have some doubts was when I heard that there would only be one song from each band. "Huh..." I thought, "only one Dropdead song? That's only gonna be like a minute of material." But I still had high hopes, and when it was made available on Deathwish.Inc I bought it immediately. I spun it on my turntable, and was ultimately incredibly disappointed.
First off, the production on the Converge side is incredibly rough and fuzzy. THe bass is high in the mix, the guitars are barely audible, everything just sounds messy. I think that they were trying to go for an old-school powerviolence style production job. But that combined with the vinyl pressing makes it a pretty harsh listening experience, and not in a good way. The song itself is nothing special either; pretty typical Converge, but with more blast beats than usual. Good bass tone though. Again, I think they were just trying to capture the old-school sound.
Dropdead's side is also nothing special, it just sounds like ordinary Dropdead. This song wouldn't sound out of place on any of their other releases, it's just Dropdead being Dropdead. You could argue that this is a testament to their integrity and that over the years they've still managed to keep the same sound, but it just leaves me wanting more. Like, 3 songs more. It's not horrible, it's just underwhelming.
In the end, I guess I was just expecting a more "epic" release, for lack of a better word. This split 7" just fell flat on a lot of levels for me; poor production, underwhelming songs, and poor vinyl pressing. Maybe if there were more songs and it was a 12" I might have been more thrilled, but it's not, and I'm still left unsatisfied.
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