The side project of Municipal Waste members Tony Foresta and Landphil Hall, plus Mammoth Grinder‘s Ryan Parrish and Mark Bronzino, and Hellbear bassist Rob Skotis, Richmond, Virginia based crossover Thrashers Iron Reagan team up with Arizona Death Metallers Gatecreeper for a split EP/LP (Relapse) that should leave you with a satisfyingly sore neck.

Featuring eight tracks with a total running time of just over fifteen minutes, it’s Iron Reagan who get the lion’s share of the deal with five tracks, opposed to Gatecreeper’s meagre three. However, it’s actually Gatecreeper who come off best on this release.

By now, you should know exactly what to expect from Iron Reagan and they deliver exactly that. Five gloriously fast cuts bristling with roaring energy, each one dominated by Tony Foresta’s unmistakable vocals. Light on melody, heavy on speed and groove, ‘Warning’, ‘Paper Shredder’, and the ‘Take the Fall’ are all exhilarating thrashers, while ‘Proudly Unaccountable’ is 44 seconds of fiery Crossover fury, leaving final track, ‘Burn For This’ as arguably the pick of the bunch.

 

The first of Gatecreeper’s entries is ‘Daybreak’, a slow, forceful introduction which is swiftly followed by ‘Dead Inside’ and closing track ‘War Has Begun’; two wonderfully old school Death Metal tracks that recall Entombed and Obituary at their finest. Thickly dripping riffs and equally black and viscous vocals sound like the nightmarish roar of some kind of monstrous creature slowly extricating itself from the seemingly inescapable confines of an abyssal tar pit, ready to wreak havoc on the nearest unsuspecting neighbourhood. Quite possibly your own…

 

8.0/10

GARY ALCOCK