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I put this CD in my player without looking at the booklet and instantly it sounded familiar. Well, no wonder since the Dark Funeral "side" is actually their "In the Sign..." MCD, which I reviewed over 3 years ago. Considering I thought I was holding a new Dark Funeral album (hence the pop-into-the player-without-looking-at-the-booklet part), this was a bit of a let-down - but not musically. I won't go over the Dark Funeral material again, that would be kind of redundant. Suffice it to say that if you like the band's style, you should like this half. Now the bad news: The Von part is their "Satanic Blood" release. So if you own the releases by both bands, this CD is absolutely useless. One would think that the bands would have presented a split with unreleased or demo tracks, rather than what is essentially a repackaging or existing releases. I don't know what the hell they were thinking. Anyway... This is an odd split because on one side you have Dark Funeral with a relatively polished sound, and then suddenly you hit the first Von track and whoaaaa! Talk about a drop in production quality. There's no chance of one not noticing when the tracks change to the other band (let's face it, on some extreme metal splits, it's not always that easy to figure out who the hell is playing.) Von has a more minimalistic approach to black metal, not as under-produced as "bathroom black metal" but not a lot more polished either. Forget about melody, this is essentially monotonous (especially the drumming, which is pretty much boring all along), with some good vocal work however, a raucous growl that sounds a bit detached from the rest and helps give a more "evil" atmosphere to the combination of lo-fi production and so-so musicianship. Not bad for when you're in the mood for this kind of stuff. I can't recommend this to someone who already owns some or all of the material, but if you have none of it, then it's definitely worth your cash - it's most likely cheaper than buying the individual releases separately.