Ah, yes, Chicago's Lord Mantis: one of the few bands who create album covers still capable of making me feel completely uncomfortable. Here, the cover art freaks me out in a more subtle way, but the tunes go for the throat as always, in the best of ways: opener “SIG Safer” (what are these guys ever on about, anyway?) hits hard and repetitive, like an industrial take on death metal, which sounds horrible and cheesy but here is just ugly and disturbing; it totally works. The title track is a sludgier piece of droning doom, but not droning as in “boring and hip,” droning as in “heavy.” 

Third cut “Semblances” is another slower take on rattling, urban, modern death/doom, like if Pyrrhon and Unsane did a split record together but the yahoos at the pressing plant messed it up because they were too busy with Record Store Day releases to care and put both band's songs on top of each other on one side. Cool. Closer “Final Division” gets even further into the murk and sludge, the seven-minute tune ending off this great EP with a sludgey noise rock beat and a heavy death metal pummel. Two horns up, man; Lord Mantis (who have survived a massive lineup change for this EP) do all kinds of things here (their full-lengths do even more) but keep it listenable at the same time, this 24-minute EP, which is inching towards an 8.5 rating, definitely worthy of many repeat spins.