Black Leather Jesus / Moth Drakula (Deadline)
New split tape featuring the beloved Black Leather Jesus and the returning Moth Drakula. A hefty c60 of material. The cover art on this tape is so good.
The Black Leather Jesus side features two killer tracks. The first encapsulates everything about BLJ that I love. It's perfectly dense, heavy, powerful, and ripping. It's exactly what you expect and want to hear from them. If someone asked you to play them one track by BLJ, this would represent them perfectly.
The second track is crumbly, low-end, mid-heavy, semi-textural harsh noise. It plays to some contrast in style to the first, but builds from the minimal start and gets fairly gnarly, harsh, and active.
This split is some of the strongest material I've heard from BLJ since their track on the Freak Animal International Vol. 3 comp. They also released two collab tapes recently worth noting. One with ANTIchildLEAGUE and the other with the lesser-known, slowdanger. Both very satisfying. The one with slowdanger actually might be the better of the two.
Moth Drakula's been back for a couple of years and already has a few tapes and a full-length under their belt in that time. They put out a very solid harsh c10 in 2024 titled, More Than Your Opinion. Then there was the more morose and atmospheric full-length CD, I Greet You At The Beginning Though I Can't Control Your Exit.
On this split, they laid down a single 30-minute behemoth. Full on pedal to the metal harsh noise, which goes non-stop for the full side of the tape. They run through a gamut of harsh sounds with gurgling mutant caveman vocals, ripping feedback and metal junk, areas of laser noise, and dense echoing waves of sound. All baked into a non-flinching avalanche of harsh pedal noise. Surprisingly never gets boring or stale throughout and continues to find new momentum to keep lurching forward. I'm actually extremely impressed with how good this track is.
This could be another year-end list contender.
