This split EP comes to me as an unknown quantity. I didn't know the two British acts, but it's always a pleasure to get to hear some good extreme nastiness piped out of this small island. To be fair, the extreme and the nasty were the two things that jump straight down my throat as soon as this 25 minute EP rattled out of its shadowy hole.

After the Last Sky were first with their furore, self termed “Blackcore”, sounds like it could be a militant black civil rights movement back in the 1960's, who knows?. One thing is for sure the delivery of the music is probably as powerful and radical as my spurious association might suggest.

Bearing in mind the band believes “The Essence Of Our Art Is Hatred”, (this also being the title of their side of the EP) strong minded severe disdain for exploitation and tyranny is probably an issue with After the Last Sky. Acting as the obvious outlet for the band's personal views and perception of the world at large, gives the narrative, an impassioned focus. These are diatribes denouncing society's crass existence, in part and tales of drunken woe for the plainly titled ‘Regretting those Drunken Words'. The “Blackcore” manifests itself in the form of as many repugnant mutations as you would care to take on.

As and when the mood takes them, you could find yourself up against some harsh blackened death metal or feeling the full blasts of some grinding crust, or just the same be battered to a pulp by some thick sludge burdened doom; it's as easy as that! The three songs on the EP opens with ‘Art School Lebensborn' and at the first coughs up its raw disjointed blasts and awkward rambling passages of sludge induced noise. Torturous stuff to say the least, it's not easy to describe all the shafting music styles any better than what I said early, but at all times this remains so dark and intimidating in its approach, it's like watching Nosferatu (1929) while addled on the narcotics of your choice.

It goes without saying that it is brutally British. When the blast beats are pummelling down they bring a spirit of raw necro hysteria in true black metal fashion, it feels cold and blunt throughout, a suffocating atmosphere about it, an industrial wilderness of depleting emptiness. This actually runs through the whole EP. A dire desperate quality that adds to the ruthless, tormented music.

After the Last Sky will slow down to a rotting corpse pace at times and this is the major difference. They play with the darkest attributes of metal, blasting away with unadulterated scorn, and making sure that what comes your way will not be the easiest of sounds to digest- extreme music in its raw and necessary form.