The difficulties inherent in approaching such a lo-fi, spiky album as _Slicer_ smooth out as the listener settles into the band's sound and songwriting choices. Max coughs up a sandpaper-dry vocal performance, not unlike Evil Chuck's approach to early Death material. At times, the bass is hard to point out, but when it peeks through the din, those parts are punchy and well-written. Danny's drums act as solid timekeeper for the dirty, fuzzed-out proceedings, and the guitar playing all over these seven tracks buries anything you'd expect from a recording this primitive. "The Gnome" includes a noisy found-sound insertion, and "Weft" features a trippy electro-bubble intro to its voiceless groove, but mostly untampered rock instrumentation rules the sound here. Penultimate track "Lockheart" busts out a couple gorgeous acoustic minutes before "Sector 7" rounds out the record in rollicking, Mastodon-mimicking splendor.

If monitor-kicking, bird-flipping jams are your thing, make sure you get out to see Lion Splicer's augmented lineup in a live setting. For now, _Slicer_ serves as an adequate entre into the band's repertoire, but we can hope that future presentations of Lion Splicer's songs will blast through headphones as powerfully as they've blasted out those poor microphones.