Hipster celebrity and accused tattoo gun rapist Wrest from Leviathan returns with a new sidekick in an attempt to restore some underground credibility. This is a common gimmick used in rap music whenever an artist has faded from the mainstream but wants to continue making money off the young kids consuming the underground’s newest flavors. Unfortunately for Leviathan, they were never respected in the underground and Crawl displays very little potential to make any sort of impact. The split is one twelve minute song from each artist that both manage to be terrible but for very different reasons. Wrest promised “Aural Mizery” and has ironically maintained that promise.

Aesthetically there is a return to the underground for Leviathan but the music completely embraces the hipster sound of the last couple of years. Leviathan plays the usual mix of post rock and shoegaze covered in a black metal exterior. Crawl claims to play blackened doom but this is more minimalist sludge with some harsh background whispers. The production on Leviathan’s side is excellent as elements sound strong clear while maintaining grit, as vocals fluctuate naturally, drums are punchy while remaining tight and the guitar tones dominates in superposition with the bass. Crawl sounds like a teenager trying to replicate the Norwegian sound but with an apple computer and a latte.

Both compositions are idiotic and fall within the rock spectrum and do not deserve the slightest consideration as there is much better post rock music out there.

While lacking musically and tailored for the remnants of the hipster black metal crowd, this is evidently a fairly complex scam by these two artists to increase their popularity. By taking the mystery associated with one man bands and combining them with an almost hip hop sense of collaboration they can possibly scrape enough pennies for a large bucket and a two liter. All that is missing is a duet on the same track is some vegan gender fluid trans men twerking and idiots exclaiming that this is the future of metal. Leviathan does show pride in the creation as the sound emerging from the speakers is very well crafted making him better than most one man bands that follow a few YouTube videos and mix their music with whatever they can torrent. The ability to create music cheaply and quickly without the slightest of efforts has changed one man bands from being resourceful, obsessive musicians committed to their visions into idiots that could not find anyone else to make music with. This leads to a new type of one-man-metaller that is too lazy to perfect their songs as they record one song and forget about it as quickly as I have forgotten about this split.

Tags: 2018, Black Metal, burnouts, Crawl, doom, dsbm, gimmicks, hipsters, Leviathan, one man bands, one man metal, rap, rape, review, shoegaze, split, suicidal black metal