Too many splits attempt to make seductive Siamese twins out of bands that are just too damn similar to make it really interesting. Admittedly, Siamese twins are in and of themselves naturally interesting and these similar-band pairings sometimes do work. But too often you wind up with a two-headed beast of the “Jessica Simpson/Nick Whatever-his-name-is” variety and crushing blandness is the inevitable result. When you have truly divergent personalities smushed up together, it just makes it that much more interesting and pleasantly jarring. Fear of a Mosh Planet is a case in point. You will have no trouble telling the two groups on this split apart. Now, with 1-2-GO! Crew, I must confess to being far from ideally suited to throw any kind of meaningful critical light on these guys. The idea of someone like me reviewing something rap/hip-hop is probably like having Paris Hilton try to say something insightful about a Mentors show. In fact, the Fat Boys are about the only hip-hop group who, by virtue of the sheer heft of their awesomeness, ever broke through the walls of my sheltered little world and started punk-slapping me around. So though my couple Fat Boys tapes hardly afford me the “street cred” to be mouthing off on such things – I’ll go ahead and say simply that I like this posi-core sXe rap music the 1-2-GO! Crew serves up. It even has a rap remake of Damage Deposit’s “Ninjas to the Back” and some human beat boxing that helped me to feel a little bit more at home. Spitting Teeth, on the other hand, is more familiar territory for me; they lunge at you and smack you around the room with feisty, thrashy hardcore that has a slight southern-fried Confederacy of Scum undercurrent at times. Each side of this record stands on its own, but taken all together, this is one refreshing one-two punch of a split 7 incher.
–aphid (1-2-3-4-GO!)