PISTÖNS/BESTHÖVEN, Pistöns/Besthöven (2010, Suffering Jesus Productions)

The skull:
Just your basic skull-in-deep-shadows here. We’ve seen better, and we’ve seen worse, but really, if you’re gonna go with a Big Dumb Skull, it’s best to avoid that middle ground. You want to totally rule, or completely suck. The top of the BDS bell curve is a sad place to be.

The music:
Pistöns are basically 70% Motörhead and 30% Venom, which I guess really means they’re 90% Motörhead and 10% Cronos’s barfy voice. They’re pretty good for the style, with solid riffs and convincing delivery, but they would really benefit from better vocals. Even Lemmy’s barely melodic delivery goes a long way toward differentiating what are, in the end, pretty similar songs, and Pistöns don’t even have that much going on. Still, if you like those bands, Pistöns are as good as any other knockoff I’ve heard, and they don’t come off as jokey, which is a nice change of pace. Besthöven, as you can tell by the logo, are a Discharge clone, and while those are typically useless and bad, Besthöven are awful even by comparison to their barrel bottom peers. Really sloppy low-fi shit. They only waste about 7 minutes of this split’s 22 minute running time, which I guess is the brightside, but it really makes me wonder why Pistöns would agree to share the space with them? Maybe a bet was involved. Or blackmail.
— Friar Johnsen