Torn in Half smashes skulls with their four-track EP “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”. Fortunately, I live on the other side of the Atlantic and don’t have to worry about my beautiful, well-defined skull. This short piece of aggression will set a dark small club ablaze in no time. Torn in Half is a band that I need to see live, a bloody battlefield is guaranteed.
“B.I.B.L.E” (“Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”) opens as a standard Death Metal EP: a low grunt; doomy riff; followed by a short acceleration …anything but bad yet quite standard, until a firm dash of beatdown is thrown into the blender and a blunt, all-crushing groove gets created. Don’t get me wrong when I use the term Beatdown, I don’t mean to link this band with the overproduced Deathcore genre. Hell no, this is the kind of Death Metal that creates life-threatening moshpits and rips headbangers cervical vertebrae.
“B.I.B.L.E” takes ten minutes and 41 seconds to knock you out cold, but when these ten minutes are up you think to yourself, “What the fuck was that?”, your finger will automatically go to the repeat button, “Let’s do this again!”. During the second song “The False God” Nick G’s low masturbating gorilla grunt gets combined with a high psychopath scream which give this brutal sound even more punch.
The production got severely abused by Eric Sauter at Blackheart Sound. He provided these four tracks with a dry and bone-hard sound that perfectly highlights every detail.
If you have never sustained a bruised cervical vertebra and you are in a real masochistic mood then put Torn in Half on repeat and keep the neck support close at hand. (Franki_boj)
