Northless/Light Bearer: Split

Cosmic post-sludgers slug it out for all eternity

You can trust Louder Our experienced team has worked for some of the biggest brands in music. From testing headphones to reviewing albums, our experts aim to create reviews you can trust. Find out more about how we review.

Split LPs can be tricky affairs. In many cases they simply don’t contain either band’s best material and equally as often, when limited to what they can fit on one side of a seven-inch, the level of constraint, for many bands, doesn’t allow the room for ideas to fully develop. There are plenty of exceptions – last year’s Locrian/Horseback split being one example.

And now too this split from Milwaukee’s nihilistic sludge behemoths Northless and London’s own darkly progressive denizens of heaviness, Light Bearer.

Making a claim for the track title of the year award with opener For As Long As You Walk The Earth Your Blood Will Reek Of Failure, Northless nonetheless rather plod along in a familiar, yet horrendously heavy vein of Neurosis-like bludgeons, with Eyehategod nihilism and the merest contamination of Khanate levels of hegemony-shredding noise.

The payoff is Light Bearer’s near-22-minute contribution, Celestium, which creeps and crawls from constricting noise to cacophonous sludge to subtle, emotional meanders reminiscent of *shels.