Album Review: Cyanic/Infinite Waste 2015 Split

This EP is a collaboration between San Jose’s Cyanic and Oakland’s Infinite Waste. Both bands from the California coast have a propensity for coarse, ball-busting dissonance with distorted guitars and beastly vocals. Here is a track-by-track review of this split:

Cyanic have blasting soundwalls of sinuous counterpointed rhythms, which intertwine with complexity. The vocals are good, even though the sound quality itself is somewhat choppy. The drums, bass, and guitar each play their own thing, moving away and then converging together. Their first song, Pyromancy, hits the ground running with technical speed and grinding fury. This track is the best example of their contrapuntal prowess. Thier second offering, Death Within, is less complex but just as angry.

Infinite Waste are fucking grimy. Again, the recording quality seems relatively low budget, but it suits the music. The guitar has some intricate sweeping, especially in Elitist, but otherwise this is uniformly crunchy, pounding death metal with grind influence. The final track, Affluenza, is more typical of this, with a repetitive structure characterized by thudding drums and guitars. The vocals for both Infinite Waste tracks were average, but enhanced by the interaction between the high pitched screams and lower gutterals.

This split itself is short, so it’s like trying to find the next numbers in a sequence with an insufficient sample. This EP will only take up 12 minutes of your time, at most. Each track would fit in on the average metalhead’s playlist, making this split is a worthy download, especially if you like shuffling your music. However, as a whole album, the length is so modest that It can’t possibly satisfy with one listen, and putting it on repeat will drive you insane. While
it’s not the best material from either band, the music is good enough to excite curiosity about their other releases. These factors compensate for the disappointing length, earning this album three stars out of five.