CHECK OUT THIS FREE SPLIT FROM ARCANIA AND BLUE WAFFLE
Proving that album art can still matter in the digital age: I checked out Galactic Infections, the new free split from Arcania and Blue Waffle, based entirely on the awesome cover by Ken Sarafin. And I’m glad I did, ’cause it’s pretty dang good!
Arcania’s half of the split is a song called “Susceptible To Retinal Based Reprogrammability,” and if you guessed based on that title that it’s deathcore, you guessed correctly. Your tolerance for pig squeals may determine how much you enjoy this — the vocals are far and away my least favorite part, and I actually don’t mind pig squeals (see: the new Cryptopsy album). But there’s nothing wrong with the music, which alternates smoothly between stomping brutality and machine gun fire viciousness. And it’s pretty damn catchy, too. It’s not hard to imagine this band on a tour with All Shall Perish — I mean that as a compliment.
Blue Waffle’s instrumental contribution, “Wired,” isn’t as interesting as Arcania’s, although based on the opening’s promise of epic elephants marching riffage, for a moment I thought I might like it more. Ironically, given my feelings about Arcania’s song, this track feels like it is in desperate need of a vocalist. “Wired” is just too simple to work as an instrumental; it finally seems to “go somewhere,” so to speak, towards the end, but that, of course, is really too late. This shortcoming, compounded with the song’s demo-quality production, makes “Wired” the vastly inferior of the two tracks on Galactic Infections. That being said, I would be curious to hear what Blue Waffle do in the future, because there are elements of the song that I think are good, and it’s entirely possible that the band could evolve into something more noteworthy in the future.
Stream Galactic Infections below and make up your own mind. You can download it for free here.
-AR
[via No Clean Singing]
