3 out of 5

Label: Hydra Head

Producer: Varies per trackish..?

Do I feel awesome to have a copy of a limited 7″?  Yeah, totes.  And I love Pelican, and I love Scissorfight, and I’m learning to love Austerity Program, so this is a rockin’ super-cool win, yeah?

Yeah?

Couple things.  The Pelican track – gw – is from Australasia.  My record player / ears isn’t / aren’t good enough to say if it’s a new recording, but I don’t think so.  But – it sounds a little reverby on disc, and the 7″ (perhaps the vinyl version of the album as well) keeps it crisp, so while that’s a plus, I can’t help but feel a little sleighted in that our other two groups (I believe) contributed new tracks.  So I’m docking it a little for that.  Which is unfair unfair but bite me.  It is a great song.

On the flip-side, Scissorfight’s track sounds like it might be a cover (again, I’m not good enough to say), but it’s a perfect capture of the band’s rockin’ and rollin’ sound, and similarly sounds really sweet here, along the lines of the Mantrapping mix, where the guitars and Ironlung aren’t competing for space but they both sound rippin’.  But I must dock it a bit for the Austerity song, because I just don’t feel like it translates well quality-wise, or as a standalone track.  The group’s shtick is built around a thumping drum machine over machine a dude shouts in a monotone while smashing guitar chords.  It sort of sounds like it’s made for the collectible 7″ world, but at under 2 minutes, it feels like a footnote here, and the mad clash of machine and machine needs a sort of mechanical edge in the production quality to make it work (for me), so I like what I’ve heard moreso on disc.  and I should be thankful whenever a 7″ manages to include more than just 1 song on each side.

So nothing’s really bad here, and my judgments are, like, circumstantial or whatever.  But, like, they’re judgments.  So.  That’s sort of how that goes.