Modder - The Great Liberation Through Hearing (2023)

Country: Belgium
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 17 Nov 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

A couple of years ago, almost to the day, I reviewed the debut album from Modder, a sludge metal band from Ghent, which impressed me because it was entirely instrumental, and they kindly sent a copy of their follow-up over for review. It's a better album, I think, even though I'm going with the same rating, because it shifts the most routine song from the end to the beginning, where it works as a mood setter. Belly Ache doesn't do a lot, but what it does is crushingly heavy, an onslaught of sound to get us set. There are things going on under that brutal riffing but they're teasingly kept so deep that we have to pay serious attention to catch the nuances.

That continues into Gazing into Domination, with a little more variety, but it drops away a minute and a half in, just as Spasm did last time out, and suddenly everything's open. It's a rejuvenation, an affirmation of everything good in the world, as if we were confined into a tiny space for so long that we don't remember what we did before it, only to suddenly be surrounded by freedom. There have only ever been clouds and now there's blue sky. It takes a while to adapt, as if we're having to relearn how to see, but we do and, when the walls descend again, we're somehow more alive.

While the whole album is emphatically sludge metal, pairing the doom with a tinge of industrial and upping the distortion even further, there are other things happening here and there to make it rather interesting and, roughly speaking, every successive track does more. Those are beats we might expect from electronica to kick off Feral Summer and again on These Snakes, the latter with a military sort of echo. There are synth lines that feel like alerts or sirens under a few of the songs almost as a substitute for vocals.

Feral Summer also speeds up at one point to hint at thrash, which is impactful with this amount of distortion. The Devil is Digital slows things right down and allows the bass to climb out of the mire to play far more obviously, only to then ramp the tempo back up again with an industrial overlay. I might like Gazing into Domination more than I apparently should as track two, but otherwise, I'm more on board with each track than its predecessor, all the way to These Snakes, the closer, which is the most versatile and ambitious of the lot.

I like this one a lot. The beats are a constant companion for half the song and they provide a real atmosphere to it, reminiscent of djembe, especially during a section that's basically a hand drum solo. There's also something that's almost a vocal and very middle eastern in vibe. It does heavy up and simplify down at points but there are always fascinating things waiting around the corner. What's more, while other songs maintain their generally high level of intensity, this one gradually builds throughout and that works really well.

The band is mostly the same as last time out, only one change evident with Jamal Talibi replacing Maxime Rouquart on the second guitar, but they feel more assured. This is heavy stuff indeed and, if you want to be sonically assaulted, your wish wil be granted here, especially on Belly Ache, but it grows in variety and depth with each of the six tracks on offer until they're somehow playing world music, merely in insanely heavy fashion. I've listened through this album a few times now and each time follows that same arc, where I enjoy the immediate bludgeoning and then let it all grow over me until the end.

I like Modder over most sludge metal bands because they're fully instrumental, a sample here and there notwithstanding, and it's the vocals that tend to be the weakest aspect of sludge for me. At this point, I could actually see Modder adding a vocalist but in a very different style to every other sludge band. I'm thinking more like Jarboe with the Swans, but more ethnic. Get a middle eastern female vocalist on board, maybe add a hurdy gurdy and suddenly Robert Plant will be guesting as a vocalist over epochally heavy riffs. How cool would that be?

Melvins - Lord of the Flies (2022)

Country: USA
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 10 Jan 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

As I explore the end of year lists from 2021 to see what I've missed, I noticed Working with God by the Melvins, an insanely influential American rock band who hardly fit into any single bucket but pioneered both grunge and sludge, among many other genres. They're also notably prolific, with an acoustic double album issued last year too. I haven't listened to the Melvins a lot and not for a while, but they have a new EP out today, so let's catch up here, especially as my first reaction was to wonder how long it's actually been.

Never Say You're Sorry is heavy but slow, almost industrial tones generating the sludge, feedback just another tool in the band's sonic arsenal. It's almost like a Danzig song at half speed, but with clean vocals overlaid by founder member Buzz Osborne. The other original on offer, because this is not a long EP, clocking in at only a breath over thirteen minutes, is The Receiver and the Empire State. It's a little less patient and a little more chaotic, but it finds a consistent vibe. I believe the two bookends are going to end up on the next album, whatever and whenever that will be.

What surprised me was how old school Never Say You're Sorry felt, something even more obvious with Spoon Man, which feels like it's a sixties psychedelic song being covered by an underground band a couple of decades later. It also features Matt Cameron of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam on drums, the song really being a cover of a Soundgarden number from Superunknown, so written in or around 1994 and usually credited without the space in the title. I like it. It's both perky and dark and it shifts a little better than the original for me.

The next song is a cover too, but intriguingly not of one original. It's called Misty Mountain Urge, because it's primarily Misty Mountain Hop by Led Zeppelin, a band who always sound fascinating when covered by heavy alternative rock bands, but it morphs into Uncontrollable Urge by Devo. I hadn't heard this one but checking it out on YouTube highlights just how much it sounds like Misty Mountain Hop already, so it's the most natural mash up in the world. The riff is almost identical. How did Devo not get into trouble for this back in the day?

And that's it, because thirteen minutes is over pretty quickly when three of the songs don't reach the three minute mark. Misty Mountain Urge feels oddly substantial, given that it's done in only two. So, while this sounds good and I'm thankful for the introduction to Uncontrollable Urge and the reminder about Spoonman, it's really just a blip in the discography of a band as prolific as this. At least it's priced well, at only five bucks.

Modder - Modder (2021)

Country: Belgium
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 3 Dec 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

Here's a submission from Belgium that satisfies a wish of mine that's often manifested this year. I really like the heaviness generated by sludge metal bands but I tend to dislike the raucous shouty vocal style that such bands often employ. The obvious solution is Modder, an instrumental sludge metal outfit who play long, heavy songs without a single attempt to vocalise anything. Everything revolves around the riffs, which have always been my favourite aspect of sludge.

I was hooked by a the opener, the nine and a half minute Mount Frequency, and the band kept me paying attention throughout. This one is built off a riff that's simple in nature and told simply, but it's a good one and it's the bedrock under what I would call atmosphere if that word didn't have a different meaning in genre names. Modder have a knack of setting a scene with their songs and it doesn't come from the riff at all, though that's slow and heavy and hypnotic. It comes in part from a melodic line that's doomy but often ethnic, almost middle eastern, and in part from electronic overlays that are like ambient industrial.

The latter is there even more on Wax Rituals, which is slowed and downtuned further anyway but benefits immensely from these overlays. Both these songs could fairly be read as improvisations on themes by latter day Celtic Frost, whether it's dark rhythmic chords or upbeats on the drums. However, this one adds even more of a gothic industrial ambience that's drenched in horror. I can easily imagine people using Wax Rituals as haunt music, even taking the slowing and downtuning even further to include subsonics to affect mood.

That industrial edge is omnipresent, adding those layers of texture, but industrial is inherently an artificial sound, whether it's the heartbeat of pulsing machinery or their by products like hails of sparks or escaping steam. Spasm has that industrial edge too, but there's something fundamentally organic in it too, as if its earliest overlays are the tortured catgut strings of cellos rather than steelcutters in a factory, and its punctuating sounds like giant ocean bubbles.

Spasm also differs from the others by dropping the riffs away completely just before the halfway mark. Sure, it allows a shift in mood for the second half of the song but it's like an entire complex shut down for the night and we suddenly see animal life emerging from the quietened shadows. I love this, even though it's brief, because it really helps to make this visual. You're probably going to see something else entirely to what I saw, but you're going to see something. There's post-rock here, or post-metal. Is post-sludge metal a thing? Maybe it is now.

My least favourite song here is the last one, When Your Bones Weren't Meant to Be, for no better reason than everything before it feels unusual and this one merely feels like a jam around a set of riffs that the band happen to like. Sure, those are decent riffs and I didn't dislike the piece at all, but it feels somehow less substantial and more unoriginal after three more evocative tracks.

It's great to hear something this unusual and especially when it's submitted for review. It's been a very interesting week, listening to subgenre that I hadn't heard before, like Mothflesh's technical groove and now Modder's ambient industrial and post-sludge. Now, what's slated for tomorrow's playlist? Thanks, folks!

Dakat Doomia - A Hail from the End (2021)

Country: Israel
Style: Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Jun 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | YouTube

One of the genre boundaries that I have the most trouble with is the one that lies between doom and sludge metal. It's a thin boundary but it often seems like the two genres approach it from completely different directions. Doom is traditional metal that's been slowed down, often considerably. Sludge is hardcore punk that's been rocked up but ends up in a similar place. It's dirtier, more dissonant and, in many instances, less elegant. Stoner metal also comes into play on the boundary between them, often by adding a psychedelic element, though that's more common with doom than sludge.

I mention all this because Dakat Doomia, who hail from Israel, have pitched their tent exactly on that boundary and it makes their sound fascinating. I get the impression, which may be completely wrong, that the band are more comfortable with doom and their go to texture is atmospheric and doomy, but they have wider tastes and they often trawl in sludge and psych for effect. The sludge mostly shows up in Yahav Zukin's guitarwork when there's a need for emphasis. Maor Movsovich's harsher vocals add a further level of darkness and dirt, but he's closer to a death growl than a hardcore shout.

I believe this is technically listed as an EP but, at half an hour, it's longer than some entire albums that I've reviewed lately and it kicks off with its longest song, a complex piece called Paranoia. At different points, it calms down and heavies up on a sort of wave, but it also shifts from an elegant doom sound, à la Candlemass, to a faster, more edgy one with more of a Trouble feel to it. The harsher vocals make it darker, though I should add that Movsovich doesn't stay harsh throughout. It's an interesting song.

And the album only gets more interesting from there. The approach taken in Paranoia of doom with a little sludge only builds with Meteor, but this one adds in a psychedelic edge too through clean vocals and more mellow guitar. And then, two and a half minutes in, it really starts rocking with a raw riff to grab our attention and a gorgeous pause to cement it in place. Then it finds an example of what is my favourite mode for Dakat Doomia, which is a bouncy riff combined with a wailing solo and that growl over it. It's gorgeous and the similar example halfway through Eternal March is even better.

Eternal March layers on the psych and, almost a minute in, throws in a very sludge guitar just oozing with distortion. This song really grows and may be the best one here. I may well always prefer doom to sludge, but to me this is what sludge was created for. It's elegant and smooth and organic until it has a yen to dirty everything up and wail out the blues. The Voids Call does some of the same thing, a lush psychedelic heavy blues song that's as often dark Hawkwind as it is Black Sabbath.

And that leaves Sight of Death, a seven and a half minute epic with a gloriously creeping atmosphere to kick things off. I wonder if the cover art is meant to illustrate this scene, because it feels cavernous, echoing and dark. It also feels different, because the voice, which I presume is Movsovich's, isn't using English at this point, though he does sing in English throughout. This is more of a spoken word section with a reprise later in the piece and I presume he's conjuring in Hebrew [Note: Maor Movsovich kindly let me know that it's actually in Russian]. Regardless of whoever does it and what language it's in, it's effective.

I like this album and I found that I liked it more the longer it ran. It's good when it's pure doom, or as close as it gets, but the sludge adds to it and the psychedelic stoner edge adds even more. Apart from Eternal March being released as a single, this is their first work since forming in 2018 and I'm keen to hear more.

Devastating Light - I Have Already Failed You (2021)

Country: Finland
Style: Doom/Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 9 Jan 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

This EP is a little older than I would usually review in May, given that it went up on Bandcamp back in January, but it's getting released in traditional form around the world and it's still a 2021 release so I'm up for it, especially as it was sent to me for review. Thanks to Teemu Toikka for sending it over, but then he does everything else on this album too, so publicity is just one more hat for him at this point. He wrote it, played every instrument on it, mixed it, mastered it and probably swept the studio floor and switched off the lights at the end of the day too.

If this is a Teemu Toikka brain dump, it suggests that life can be pretty depressing way up there in the frozen wastes of Tampere, Finland. Hey, I'm in Phoenix, Arizona, often described as the boiler room of Hell; even the sunny Mediterranean seems like frozen wastes to me nowadays. However, I was born in the UK and grew up in Yorkshire, twenty degrees of latitude further north, so I remember days where I never saw the sun. Get up in darkness, go to work in darkness, go home in darkness and go to sleep in darkness. Rinse, repeat until spring shows up. Tampere is eight more degrees north, even if it's in the south of Finland.

The concept behind the name of Devastating Light aims to capture that feeling, because Teemu is of the mindset that, while the darkness of winter is depressing, when spring arrives with the sun in tow, somehow the light is more depressing still. And I can grok that. Right now, I dread the moments when I have to open the front door because there's a burning ball of fire in the sky that wants to kill me. The light here really is devastating. Air conditioning FTW.

Any music built on this sort of idea and with a title like I Have Already Failed You is going to be acutely depressing and that tends to means achingly heavy and that's exactly what this is. This EP runs for 28 minutes, so only a long breath shorter than Reign in Blood. That's generous for an EP, even if it's taken up by one song in three parts, but the journey Toikka takes us on, courtesy of the train that brings us the initial part and takes away the final one, never gets overwhelming. It's abidingly heavy and his voice is a shriek into the void, but I enjoyed riding this melancholy.

Reading the lyrics, this seems to be an incessant dive into the deepest depression, because it reads in many ways like a suicide note, full of "crushing emptiness", "self hatred" and "no hope". "I can't help myself," Toikka tells us in Part Two, "I think no one can. The dark consumes me. The light destroys me. No sense in being." It's freeform suicide poetry and it's shrieked in an almost black metal style under the music, as if it feels unworthy to take the lead.

However, the music tells a different story to me. To my mind, there's isolating depression, which is not easy to listen to because it's inherently built on rejection, and there's welcoming depression, which is far more accessible and that's what I'm getting from this. It makes me feel like Toikka isn't screaming for help, whatever those lyrics might suggest; he's exploring his personal darkness through creativity so we can join him down there and share the weight of all this. In my darkest hours, I turn to Leonard Cohen and Joy Division for that reason because they're welcoming depression. Now I know I can turn to Devastating Light too.

This song, because there really is only one neatly bookended piece here, is broken up into three long parts, two in the eight minute range and the third over eleven. They're slow and patient, as befits the doom metal genre that I'd place this in first, but there's a recurring tone that brings sludge into play, as does the vocal because sludge metal really doesn't seem to like clean vocals. However, there are a lot of dynamics going on, presumably to show us that depression isn't a single moment, it's a ride and some moments are darker than others. I particularly like Part Three for this, because the weight lifts for some glorious sections before reasserting itself.

Thanks for this, Teemu. You haven't failed anyone here. Like the darkness of winter, I didn't want this to end.

Discarded Self - Discarded Self (2021)

Country: Canada
Style: Blackened Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 30 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

Thanks to Piers from Sarcophagus Recordings for sending this album over for review. Discarded Self is a solo project for Jarret Beach, who plays bass for the Canadian melodic death metal outfit Ashes of Yggdrasil, whose debut EP I reviewed back in 2019. He plays everything here except the drums, with a quartet of guests, mostly from his other bands, taking turns behind the kit. I say bands, because he's also the vocalist and guitarist for Destroy My Brains, who play doom/sludge metal, and he remains in that vein here for Discarded Self.

This is mostly sludge, occasionally moving into cleaner doom, but with black metal harshness overlaid in abandon, especially with the vocals. Blackened sludge seems like a fair description of much of this, especially the openers, I Smell Pipes and Orbitoclast, and I have to say that I like them a lot more than much of the sludge I've been hearing lately with more shouty hardcore vocals, even if Beach's voice is often so dominant that it threatens to overwhelm the music.

Push the Knife makes the guitar a little less visceral and adds melodies that hint at doom/death, but the vocals remain thoroughly black and so dominant that it's only really blackened doom in the more instrumental sections. Dance Upon the Dead does something similar, clean doom rising up through a cloudbank only to be quickly submerged again.

And, when we get to Cultist of the Pentagram and some neat faster old school churn, the black metal is pushed so far into focus that it can't really be called blackened anything any more, just black metal, even if it doesn't exist for its blastbeats and it slows down a couple of minutes in to remind us that it started out as sludge, even adding a strange duet between Beach's lead vocal and a recurring spoken word sample.

I think that's my favourite track here, though I dig the riffs in Abused (e)Motionless and Orbitoclast a lot too. Oddly, the latter is a short track here, at six and a half minutes, because Beach leans towards epics and is very generous with the running time. Only Cultist of the Pentagram is shorter here and a couple of songs, albeit one that's missing from my copy of the album, stretch past ten minutes. Push the Knife is the one I have and it's surprisingly vocal for a song of that length. I'd have expected more instrumental sections but Beach's voice is never too far away.

If On the Unlevel was restored, this album would last over an hour, which certainly means good value for money but also a heck of a lot of blackened sludge in one go. I never got bored at all, even after a few times through, but it's fair to say that blackened sludge is a genre that brings its own mood along with it and I tend to prefer mine in more bite sized chunks. From that standpoint, I think this is a "your mileage may vary" album. If this is absolutely your genre, it's good stuff. If it's not, then it's still good stuff but it may feel a little overwhelming.

Gynoid - The Hunger Artist Show (2021)

Country: Greece
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's something interesting from Greece. How many times have I said that over the last few years? I should thank Gynoid guitarist/vocalist Sypros Tsalouchidis as much for underlining once more just how vibrant the scene in Greece seems to be at the moment as for sending over his band's debut album for review, but I'm thankful for both. They describe what they do as both noise rock and sludge metal and that seems fair, even if it sometimes seems like the two genres are battling each other for supremacy in the Gynoid sound, albeit never to the death.

The Collar, which is the opening track proper, shows their commitment to metal, with strong riffs that are inspired, almost inevitably, by the Black Sabbath playbook. These musicians can definitely be tight when they want to be, which they are in the metal sections of The Collar and especially in Scissorman, which feels like a garage punk band covering Voivod. It's intricate and tricky and it's very tight except when it doesn't want to be tight at all. Sometimes Gynoid want to be really loose.

This is epitomised in breakdowns that sound like everything might fall apart but never does, because the band always know where they're going next and they're just keeping us on the hook. Usually these points are pause moments in songs when my imagination tells me the mobile musicians are prowling around, stirring up the pit by almost creating one themselves on stage. This works really well, but it's less effective when it's a whole song, like Garbageman (Apeman). In the briefer pauses, we know this is the calm before the storm and, sure enough, that storm promptly arrives all the more effective for the buildup. It never arrives on Garbageman.

The loose aspect is also epitomised in the vocals, which couldn't be any further from *insert favourite Sabbath vocalist here*. They're equal parts Serj Tankian, Jello Biafra and Fred Schneider of the B-52's, with perhaps a side of Blaine from the Accüsed, which boils down to very alternative and very punk. It fascinated me to see how the tight metal aspect found a way to co-exist here with the loose punk one, and I have to say it that way around because the punk side of this band's sound clearly couldn't give a monkey's about the metal side in the slightest. It drives Gynoid wherever the hell it wants, leaving the metal side to figure out ways to support it.

Sometimes they're so loose that the sound goes to very strange places indeed. My Mirror, My Master wraps up the album in a way that sometimes feels like that same garage punk band who was covering Voivod earlier is now taking on Crimson Glory but ending up more in Jandek territory instead, which is not remotely what I expect when I throw on a sludge metal album. I'm not sure if I like this song or not but Gynoid are never conventional or predictable and I know that I like that.

While it wasn't hard for me to identify favourite songs—Scissorman and Mannequin are my highlights with My Pet Worms and The Collar not too far behind—it was a heck of a lot harder to figure out what I liked about them most.

I like the fact that they're a trio, because it makes for a sparse sound with an incredibly obvious bass playing an important role, occasionally taking the lead. Panos Dedis often reminded me of Tony Sales, who was the utterly reliable bassist behind Iggy Pop when that singer was at his most unpredictable. I like the guitars on My Pet Worms a lot but I love the parts where the bass takes the lead. I like when Tsalouchidis riffs. I like the more unusual rhythms that Nikos Dimitriou finds on The Collar. But that's me.

In the end, I think whether you'll like this band or not will come down to whether you like the vocals. I can't say which are Tsalouchidis and which are Dimitriou, but they're wild and they're unrestrained. If you like the idea of sludge metal played by a punk trio with vocals that could go absolutely anywhere at all at the drop of a hat, so keeping you totally on the hop, then Gynoid might be the favourite band you haven't heard of yet.

Eyehategod - A History of Nomadic Behavior (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Punk/Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I knew Eyehategod had been around a while, but I was surprised to find that they were founded all the way back in 1988. They've also had a pretty stable line-up, with two of the four members in place since their demo days; I'm sure drummer Joey LaCaze would still be there too had he not passed in 2014. It's only their release schedule that's fighting them. For a band formed the same year as Cannibal Corpse, Paradise Lost and Nine Inch Nails, it's surprising to realise that this is only their sixth studio album, given the healthy double digit output of those other examples.

I'm not sure I've ever heard Eyehategod before and I certainly can't say that this is my favourite style of all time, but they do what they do very well. Generally, they're regarded as sludge metal and there are certainly some huge riffs here, but there are few songs that really live or die on those. They have a confrontational style that's epitomised in the hardcore punk vocals of Mike Williams that sound very sarcastic indeed. He's not just singing with his audience, he's arguing with them and he has the mike.

That's only one reason why they sound very punk to me. There's a stop/start mindset to the music that makes their often already short songs feel even shorter. The Outer Banks, for example, with a creeping riff, only runs two and a half minutes but a big pause and tempo shift halfway makes it sound like two songs of a minute plus rather than one at double that. They often made me think of the Accüsed but with a serious pace drop. Even in the faster second half of that song, Eyehategod sound like an Accüsed EP played at 33rpm instead of 45rpm.

The other punk angle is that this is a deliberately rough around the edges recording, as if it's not the actual album but we've been made privy to an early rehearsal tape that would normally be polished in many ways before release. Nobody in this band cares about tidying up loose endings, presumably of a shared mindset that feedback is a crucial part of their sound. It works to my mind in Three Black Eyes, which is one of the most agreeably loose songs here, but not on Current Situation, which may actually feature more feedback than notes. Some of these three minute recordings are two minutes of song and another of plugging in instruments and checking that the guy in the booth is awake.

But, like I said, they do this well. I actually don't mind Mike Williams's vocals, because they really fit this sound. Jimmy Bower's riffs are as crushing as anything this loose can be and I liked the prowling bass of Garry Mader a lot. He's always plugging away as a reliable backdrop even when the rest of the band gives up on songs like Current Situation and The Day Felt Wrong to experiment with feedback. Sure, there's Discharge and Black Flag here, but there's some Swans too.

The last time I was this unenthused by an album that I actually reviewed (holy crap, there are plenty I don't review because there's way too much good stuff out there for me to haul the hatchet man critic persona out) was the Hum album from 2020 that did so well in the end of year lists. The big difference between the two is that, while this isn't my thing, I can easily get why it might be yours. I couldn't get why anyone would listen to, let alone like, that Hum album, but this is clearly good stuff and many of my punk friends would dig it.

Eyehategod are heavy and angry, but they're playful and inventive too. Even I got into songs like The Day Felt Wrong—"Who do you trust? Who do you trust?"—or Smoker's Piece, with its sleazy vibe and even sleazier bass, and this isn't my scene. If it's yours, then I recommend this even if I'm not likely to ever haul it out again. Well, you never know.

Zebu - Reek of the Parvenu (2021)

Country: Greece
Style: Southern Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Feb 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

Given how much quality music I've been finding coming out of Greece lately, I keep my eyes open for more and this one looked interesting. Metal Archives call what Zebu do southern metal, which is fair but not entirely true. Sure, there's plenty of sludge metal here—just check out Our Shame for sludge riffing—and stoner metal too, so southern metal works. However, there are points where they shift a little into neighbouring genres and, in at least one instance, a genre over from that, which is more of a stretch but still a welcome one.

For a start, there's some more traditional Black Sabbath type doom at points, not only in the riffing, which is especially obvious on Shattered Mentality and The Hunger, but deeper on songs like Burden, where it's obvious in soloing and breakdown sections too. There are points where the band speed up with more of a Pantera effect, especially on Hollow, so there's groove metal to be found here. And, almost at the end of The Skin I Wear, there's a section that speeds up so far we can only call it thrash.

I liked that thrashy section a lot but this band exist more naturally at a much slower pace and they're tight enough to make that work really well. If you look up Zebu's own description of their sound, they simply say that they play "heavy shit" and that's even more accurate than southern metal. It works to my thinking because they're naturally heavy without trying to overdo it. There's a lot of bass here, for instance, which doesn't mean that they downtuned everything and pumped up the spectrum's low end but simply that the bass is audible and given plenty of opportunity to be heard.

I like how they don't have to try. This could easily have been heavier but it wouldn't have had close to the same impact. Zebu can play a song like Nature of Failure with riffs they know are heavy and vocals that are rough without quite becoming harsh, but they can drop into a mellow section without fear it will make people think they're going soft. That one's the most obvious, with clean spoken word vocals, but there are a few others dotted around, often in folksy intros like on Shattered Mentality or Keys to the Gutter, where it's not just an intro but bookends. They don't make this sound soft, they just make it sound deeper and more mature and it's a better and more varied album for it.

I'd throw the vocals of Kostas Synatsakis in here too. He finds an odd balance between clean and harsh that's rather palatable. There's definitely an influence from hardcore, but he sings rather than shouts and it works. The balance isn't entirely consistent and he certainly gets rougher on The Skin I Wear to balance with the guest vocal he's duetting with, that of Katerina Kostarelou, who appears to sing with a stoner doom band called Bacchus Priest. I didn't catch all the lyrics because I was often absorbed by the music but, however rough he gets and however close to harsh, he's always intelligible.

I like Zebu even though they don't play my subgenre of choice. I like sludge metal instrumentally but often, as with Thou, hate the vocals. That applies to a lot of hardcore too: I love the urgency of it and really dig the cover art that -core bands are finding, but the vocals usually leave me dry. I like stoner metal but I'm kind of digging stoner rock more nowadays, because it can play in psychedelia far more. I like groove metal but much prefer the thrash that it grew out of. As southern metal is all the above thrown into a blender, it can be hit or miss for me.

And this one's a hit. I wouldn't call Synatsakis a new favourite singer, but I certainly didn't dislike his style, even though I was ready to, and it works well with what the band behind him are doing. I'd call out the bass work of Alexis Korbis for praise, but guitarist John Roupaliotis is no slouch, handling all the guitars here on his own, and neither is drummer Nicholas Rossis. They're heavy, they're tight and they're reliable. Job well done. If this is your genre, you ought to really dig this.

Thou & ERR - The Helm of Sorrow (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2021
Sites:
Thou: Bandcamp | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia
Emma Ruth Rundle: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

I appreciated last year's collaborative album between Baton Rouge sludge metal merchants Thou and folksy post-rocker Emma Ruth Rundle, May Our Chambers Be Full, more than a 6/10 rating suggested. I loved how the two disparate styles worked together, each rendered more interesting by the other. It was the lead male vocals of Bryan Funck that stopped me going higher, partly because they just grate on me but partly because they didn't seem to help the album at all. The haunting voice of Rundle over the darkness and weight of Thou was enough to work and the best songs did exactly that.

This EP contains four songs recorded during the sessions for that album that didn't make the final cut for whatever reason. They do much the same thing and don't sound to me like throwaway versions. I'm impressed once more by how they merge the two styles within the first four minutes of Orphan Limbs, which is neatly atmospheric until it goes batshit and screams to an abrupt finalé. At least when Funck takes over, he doesn't do so fully and his voice does play better for me when Rundle is there as a solid counter.

My favourite song here is easily the closer, Hollywood, a Cranberries cover with Rundle doing her best Dolores O'Riordan impression, full of lilting Celtic inflections, and Thou delivering a neatly ominous backdrop of beats. It's an appropriate subject for a song told this way, as the beauty of Tinseltown has always been a notable contrast to the seamy underbelly of Los Angeles and the dirty industry fuelling it. This covers both sides at once, the drums of Tyler Coburn, which shine throughout this EP, tolling a remembrance for everyone Hollywood has destroyed.

The pair of songs in between, Crone Dance and Recurrence, left me dry on a first time through but the former grew on a second. Recurrence is the closest to regular Thou, so their fans should appreciate it, even as they wonder why it's on this EP. Crone Dance is more interesting, a sort of midpoint between a more Thou song like Recurrence and a more Rundle song like Hollywood. Funck gets the lead at points but also fades to texture at others, letting Rundle take over without too much of a fight. The midsection is the heaviest the EP gets too, churning away effectively, and it ends really effectively, dropping tempo all the way to the end.

So I'll give this one a 6/10 too. It's a worthy partner to May Our Chambers Be Full, doing some of the same things in the same way and both shining and disappointing for the same reasons. If you bought the Diehard version of that album, this should have showed up as a bonus already covered. If not, but you dug that album, as so many clearly did, it making quite the dent on the end of year lists, it's safe to say that you're going to dig this too.

Thou & ERR - May Our Chambers Be Full (2020)

Country: USA
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 30 Oct 2020
Sites:
Thou - Bandcamp | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia
ERR - Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia

Even though they've only released five albums under their own name since their founding in 2005, the Baton Rouge sludge metal outfit known as Thou are actually rather prolific. They just release a lot of other stuff: split releases, EPs and, increasingly, collaborations. Thus far, all their collaborations have been with fellow American sludge metal band, the Body, but this one is quite the departure.

ERR isn't another sludge metal band, but an alternative singer/songwriter by the name of Emma Ruth Rundle, apparently best known for her folky post-rock output, not only solo but also with Marriages, the Nocturnes and Red Sparowes. She's also released darkwave and ambient guitar projects, so clearly she's versatile. That's promising when faced with a collaborative project with Thou.

Apparently, they're fans of each other and, when working together was suggested, they leapt at it. The result is certainly interesting, Rundle's clean and haunting voice providing a welcome contrast to the sheer weight of what Thou play. They are a very heavy band indeed, mixing the downtuned heaviness of sludge with the bleakness of black metal, the latter present mostly in the particularly harsh vocals of Bryan Funck. At least I think it's him, as he's credited on vocals alone while KC Stafford plays guitar too. Frankly, whoever it is, I like Thou's music a lot more than I like those vocals, which seem intrusive here.

A song like Ancestral Recall is sublime with Rundle lilting at the sky while Thou drag her back down to the earth, if not into it. It loses that dynamic entirely when Funck joins in. The same holds true on the majority of other tracks, though to a lesser degree on Magickal Cost, as the wilder rhythms keep that interesting even with a harsh voice, just not as interesting as with only Rundle. This album runs 36m and, even by the halfway point, I was convinced that this would be a much better album were Rundle the only voice heard.

Much of that is because I found Funck so annoying, but some of it is because Thou continually mix up the textures they set Rundle's voice against. That dynamic works on the heavy, dense sound of Out of Existence, but also on the sparser Magickal Cost and Into Being. Thou downtune so far that even the guitars sound like basses, except maybe during the solos on Into Being, and what sounds like an array of basses make a slow song like that one achingly heavy. Rundle is a perfect counter to whatever Thou do, orders of magnitude lighter than them but never without weight of her own. Funck fits one style only and that's limiting.

The albums wraps with a nine minute song called The Valley, which is a tearful dirge when it's entirely instrumental, its tentative guitar merging with what sounds like a violin and a distant choral effect. This is so sparse a song that Tyler Coburn's drumkit often feels like a single handheld drum, beating the toll of a life lost. This is Thou meeting Rundle on her own post-rock ground but still making it all dark. To my mind, this is easily the album's highlight, the most evocative piece of music here by far. I wasn't even disappointed when Funck briefly joins in seven minutes in like he's a wraith creeping out of a grave.

And with The Valley, and the album with it, done, I just had to start over to see how everything felt in the wake of that epic closer. I found that it played a little better, that vibe well and truly established. The album actually got lighter on a second listen, as if there was a ray of sunlight threatening to add colour to Thou's now traditional black and white woodcut cover art, even if it doesn't manage to come good on its threat. Every song improves on a second listen and Funck doesn't seem quite so intrusive, though he never becomes welcome.

I really wish I could hear this without that harsh voice, though. I was actually tempted to drop this to a 6/10 but I think that would be unfair. There's too much good stuff here for that to sit right with me. However, my 7/10 might well have been higher had I been able to wave a magic wand and make Rundle the sole voice. Certainly, the lesson of this collaboration is that she works fantastically well with Thou and I hope they work together again, in only slightly different circumstances.

Burning Gloom - Amygdala (2019)

Country: Italy
Style: Sludge Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 14 Jun 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook

I realised a couple of days ago that my next pair of reviews would reach a milestone: two hundred since the beginning of the year. I felt that ought to warrant something special to celebrate but nothing I listened to really fit the bill. I found good stuff, much of which I'll be reviewing in the days to come but nothing that really stood out as special. Until this.

Amygdala is the debut album from a sludge metal band based in Milan, Italy, who released a couple of others under an earlier name, My Home on Trees. On their Facebook page, there's a note that, after seven years under that name, they "have started a new journey, made of fires in the night, a dark road enlightened by flames."

That's an evocative way to describe a serious enough change in approach to warrant a name change, but it gets more and more appropriate as this album progresses. By the time it reached Nightmares, I found myself on that road. I may or may not also have been on fire. Certainly I was hooked.

Simply describing Burning Gloom as a sludge metal band isn't enough. Sure, that's much of what they do, but they don't sound like anyone else I could conjure up. The production is part of that. It puts Marco Bertucci's guitar well and truly up front so that the vocals of Laura Mancini have to battle for dominance. It sounds like the band performed the entire album live in a band member's garage and someone recorded it on a Walkman. Yeah, the mix is hardly optimal but it makes the band sound incredibly urgent.

It also sounds like they're performing ritual ceremonies as much as music. Tracks like Eremite, Warden and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder feel like they might have the aim of conjuring someone or something up out of the ether. Nightmares sounds like they did that before the song started and whichever demons were called forth promptly joined in with the musicians and I don't just mean on backing vocals. That's Mona Miluski from High Fighter.

This ritual approach, as much the product of the often tribal drumming of Marcello Modica as Mancini's powerful and driven vocals, brings occult rock promptly to mind, whether Coven or one of the myriad inheritors to their sound. This music is often hypnotic. Occult rock has a lot of Black Sabbath in it, but that's notable separately here, especially on Beyond the Wall. It's also combined with a minimalistic Danzig vibe, which was surprising but welcome to hear. I'd say Tool, except the rhythms aren't as complex and this is ritual in nature.

Mancini is so confident in what she does and the band, especially Bertucci, are so in our face, that it sometimes feels like I'm not in my office with the album playing out of speakers; they're playing live inside my skull and they've transported it somewhere that I don't recognise. Sometimes, like on The Tower, especially the escalating second part, it feels like my skull is too small to cope.

While it's certainly not going to be for everyone, I found it impossible to ignore this album. It's the antithesis of background music. I'm an active listener but I rarely find myself trapped inside an album like this one and I rarely find myself assaulted by the silence that follows its end. This album is alive. It doesn't want to be over and the silence knows that and shivers. It remembers the crashing riffs on songs like Warden and wonders how safe it is and when it'll be noticed. That's what makes this special.

Grave Siesta - Voidward Spin (2019)

Country: Finland
Style: Doom Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 21 Apr 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Twitter | YouTube

Here's a very different doom album. It's the third full length release from Finland's Grave Siesta, who have been around since 2010, emerging from the ashes of a death 'n' roll band called Rite. I haven't heard Grave Siesta or Piss & Vinegar, but it's been relatively widely acknowledged that the sound of the band has changed over time, moving from doom to sludge.

It's certainly a very varied album. There are points where they're too fast to feel much like doom, such as the first few minutes of Vacant Throne, but there are other points where they're rather reminiscent of old Black Sabbath ballads, like the first couple of minutes of Weakness. Other tracks cover a lot of ground in between those two extremes.

There's also a raw and punky vibe here, mostly because of the occasionally tortured vocals of Taito Halonen. He's the biggest departure from the doom sound, often drifting into death territory, occasionally into black and so ending up reminding of early extreme albums before they really became their own subgenres. There's often an early Celtic Frost sound here, which I like because it's visceral and alive and uncommercial.

I liked the album, not least because this band is clearly good at what they do and what they do is their own thing. However, I wonder if Voidward Spin holds together as an album because it changes direction a heck of a lot and that doesn't help coherence. Those who expect their bands to have one sound will be disappointed here. I like albums like Saigon Kick's Water and Sheer Heart Attack by Queen that go in every different direction but somehow hold together as musical statements. This one I'm not convinced about yet.

If you're OK with vocals like Halonen's on a doom album, there's a lot here to enjoy. Vacant Throne starts fast but ends heavy, with some dark chanting in between. Intolerance is more routine but the vocals either elevate it or destroy it, depending on your preference. He shrieks and howls on this one like he's transforming into a werewolf, only to pluck a doom melody out of the air to torture with rough style.

Weakness starts soft and patient with fluid guitarwork from Sami Lintunen. Halonen goes clean here, sounding more like Nick Cave than Blaine from the Accüsed all of a sudden. When it kicks into gear, it's still Sabbath-esque except for those shrieky vocals. Bastardized finds a neat riff and Halonen tries for regular vocals; these two songs are the closest to classic doom that the band get on this album.

They're still a little fast, which is more overt on songs like Seizures in a Castle and Depopulation Prayer. At half speed, the intro to the former would be akin to Candlemass but, at this tempo, it reminds of a more raucous Saint Vitus with a hint of the Plasmatics. One riff is reminiscent of The Day of the Humans is Gone, which was only ever doom in lyrical content.

And that leaves Post World Peace, which almost feels like the epic of the album, even though it's under six minutes long and Weakness was longer. It takes its time and is surely the slowest song on offer, but it's never the work of tradition. Halonen gargles with acid before delivering a heartfelt vocal and Lintunen's guitar actually tries to match his torture this time.

I wonder about the make up of the Grave Siesta audience. They feel like one of those bands who can be seen as cool by both metal and punk audiences but they're still not remotely commercial. Some will see that as a good thing and they may get a kick out of this, especially the first three tracks and the last, but it takes an adventurous spirit to appreciate this fully.

Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard - Yn Ol i Annwn (2019)

Country: UK
Style: Doom/Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Mar 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

As band names go, Wrexham's finest, Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, have few peers in the lack of subtlety department and that's appropriate given what they sound like. They're not particularly subtle either, except perhaps for the dulcet tones of Jessica Ball, which may not be entirely as sweet as we expect from the Welsh but which are the epitome of sweetness when compared to the music unfolding behind her like a slow mammoth stampede.

What's notable here isn't just that this music is slow, because I've heard slower, but that it's patient, stubborn and relentless, perhaps to reflect the album's title, which translates from the Welsh as "I do not know Annwn". I should point out that Annwn is not a person but a mythical otherworld of immortality, which suggests that the band may be pissed off at being merely human and, taking inspiration from the mammoth of the band's name, want to stomp everything in sight.

I should point out that the tone isn't brutal but almost disinterested, as if the guitarists are set running at a particular riff at a particular pace and they simply stick to it relentlessly throughout. The bass and the drums follow suit, with the occasional fill from the latter, while Ball is tasked with providing whatever melody is called for with her voice, which floats over the music like a dove staying in flight over an endless lake of lava. What variety we're given is added in through the use of space rock effects, which take the place of the absent lead guitar. There are no solos here.

The reason I'm reviewing this album is because this approach surprisingly works. There's a trancelike aspect to it as if the music aims to hypnotise us so that Ball can work her ritual magic over us with our defences down. I found that I really dug the thirteen and a half minute instrumental slog of Katyusha, even though, on paper, it should be ten minutes too long. There's little variance in the riffing and those space rock sound effects should go only so far, but it's somehow immersive and magical. It even gets a little lively nine minutes in, though I don't want to hint at some sort of jig. A word like 'lively' when applied to Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard is relative.

As that track might suggest, this is a long album, comprised of long songs (ranging from six and a half to eight and a half minutes) and longer songs (which start at ten and work their way up). The only exceptions are the two minute intro, named for Kurt Vonnegut's go to planet Tralfamadore, and the four and a half minute track oddly named Du bist jetzt nicht in der zukunft but oddly so, because I don't think Ball sings it in German. This feels as if it's only half a song in this company.

The most out of character track is The Majestic Clockwork, for a couple of reasons. For one, it gets downright perky a few minutes in, which I would have sworn wasn't a concept this band understood. And, for two, it ratchets up the pace consistently to an almost up tempo finalé, the first change of pace within a song in fifty minutes.

Then again, Five Days in the Abyss kicks off without riffs but with violin, a particularly melancholic violin trying to convince the sound effects that melancholy is the way to go with only partial success. Of course, when the guitars inevitably show up, they do so in suitably heavy fashion with yet another simple but highly effective riff. The riffage here is epochal but Ball's vocals are a highlight too, even though I'm not convinced that she actually has words to sing on this song.

I should call out guitarists Paul Michael Davies and Wes Leon for credit as they slay on this album with deceptive ease. They're backed by bass player Stuart Sinclair and drummer James Carrington. Each one of these folk is as stubbornly relentless as the rest and that's pretty frickin' relentless. I still have little idea why this works so well but it does.

Let's just say that it's heavy enough to live up to the band's name and no album should be heavy enough to live up to Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard.

The Mound Builders - The Mound Builders (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Sludge Metal
Release Date: 18 Jan 2019
Rating: 6/10
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

The Mound Builders have been around for a while. They released their debut album back in 2011, but it's taken seven years to get round to this one and it's easy to see that these Indiana sludge monsters have been listening to a lot of different music in that time.

Musically they're tight. Torchbearer opens this album in glorious fashion, with a slow but neatly powerful riff from Brian Boszor for the rest of the band to gradually heat up around. A minute in, he speeds up to join them and the tempo continues to grow as the track runs on. By the time Boszor gets to wail halfway through, they're speeding along at a rate of knots, ready to start slowing down again. Plot the speed of this track on a graph and it would look rather like, well, a mound. I wonder if that was a deliberate choice.

The weak side of Torchbearer for me are the vocals of Jim Voelz, who betrays the punk influence of this band most obviously. He's a hardcore shouter with a capable rasp to his voice and he does it well, but it's not my thing. The limited backing vocals are quintessentially punk harmonies too and I can't say that this vocal approach doesn't fit the material. I just know that the music here is clearly not being generated by a set of amateurs who only know three chords and I wanted to pay more attention to it than the vocals allowed me to do. I'd have loved this album if it was shorn of vocal work entirely.

In addition to Boszor on guitar, the power trio that underpin the Mound Builders is completed by Ryan Strawsma on bass and Jason Brookhart on drums. This trio obviously have punk in their blood too but, however much they're happy to speed up to thrash levels at points and almost become a crossover band, the delightfully weighty riffs betray a Black Sabbath fixation that I really can't complain about and they do seem happy to spend the majority of their time in slow doom than fast thrash, reserving speed for where it'll have the most effect.

What I think I appreciated most were the points where slow became fast or vice versa. The tempo of Acid Slugs is all over the place but the transitions are glorious. The first one took me totally by surprise but I adored it. I'm not sure what acid slugs are, though apparently they "did this to us, killing the human spirit". At least they didn't kill the spirit of this band, because the invention going on in this track is wonderful stuff.

Only one track later they do the same thing again with Star City Massacre, carefully building a sludge tempo only to ratchet up to thrash speed with a single perfectly executed transition. Fans of both Sabbath and Pantera will appreciate these songs and others in the same vein like Regolith.

Otherwise this is mostly for sludge metal fans of Crowbar and their ilk. The Mound Builders are less fuzzy in guitar tone and more shrieky in vocal style, as if the musicians want to play metal but the singer wants to stay punk. That they merge the two styles well means that, after a few more albums, maybe we'll be comparing other bands to them rather than their predecessors.