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Agathocles > Distrust and Abuse > Reviews
Agathocles - Distrust and Abuse

Superb release damaged by production - 60%

morbert, March 4th, 2008

First off let me say this EP has some great Agathocles songs and the performance is outstanding. Especially the longer crustcorish tracks “Sieg Shit” and “Big-Headed Bastards” are entertaining but the most famous and best song here is the hardcore punk sing-a-long anthem “Get Off Your Ass”. As said the performance is superb and has Agathocles in one of its best line-ups with Steve on guitars and Burt on drums.

The negative aspect of this EP however is the sole reason for bringing the rating down from 85 to 60 points. We’re talking about the production here. Especially the guitars damage the over all sound. Whereas their old split LP with Drudge had a thin and harmless sound (which I compared to vegetarian diarrhoea in an earlier review) and for instance the old Thomas Skogberg productions of Entombed and Dismember had a very typical and awkward direct-input guitar sound, the sound on this “Distrust and Abuse” EP feels like a mixture of these two sounds yet fails horribly at even sounding decent or adequate and is nothing more than an annoying soundscape hovering above the rest of the music.

Possibly a speaker simulator was used for this recording without an engineer who knew how to use its full potential. So there you have it. Had the sound been as good as the songs and performance this would have been one of the best Agathocles singles ever.