Asphalt - 357 Knock Out

This is one of the rather obscure records that came out on Dwid's Dark Empire label (he's also doing guest vocals on one song). Unfortunatly I don't know really much about this band, only that Asphalt was formerly known as False Hope with Sal LaPiccollo (bass), Hawthorne Smith (guitar) and David Nicholi Araca who died shortly after the recordings for this full length due to a brain aneurism.
The music itself is far beyond everything that kids nowadays know as "Clevo-Hardcore" or Holy Terror sound, when they talk about bands like Rise and Fall or Shipwreck (...). This record is really dark and sick, I mean, it has a really sickening feeling to it, which is hard to describe. And the music goes way further that your typical Integrity clone-band, it shows influences from Post-Hardcore, Black Metal, Stoner and what not, with strange time signatures and a really good production. If I had to come up with a mixture to describe it I'd say it sounds like a mixture between Pale Creation (on their Twilight album) and Shining's "Halmstad". Especially the vocals remind me a lot of times of the latter. Of course this is not nearly catching how Asphalt sounds like. So I really recommend to everyone to listen to this, open a bottle of redwine and just get the feeling.