There's nothing like a damned bunch of dirty hippies who've never read Kant but love to pepper discussions about ordinary household objects with allusions to his works to ruin your favorite bar or coffee shop and there's nothing like a bunch of musical auslanders. coming in to ruin your favorite kult music. Like what's-his-name did with Witch last year, this quartet comes sauntering along, thinking it can make something doomy, gloomy and real to the last drop. Close, but no inverted cross, right?
Skeptics might argue that instead we get some cool doomy passages interrupted by faux underground vocals and a whole bunch of other stuff that just seems inauthentic to subterranean metal. Some kid, blogging from his dorm in Champaign-Urbana, would have you believe that Neurosis and Isis are touchstone bands for this collective, but methinks that these cats have hunkered down in their comfortable suburban digs with more than half of the Southern Lord catalog and the hope that they might one day soon be brilliant stars of the darkened and hallowed hallways of hell rock.
And it works.
Mostly.
While this collective doesn't travel as smoothly twixt hair-raising saunters into the nighttime world and back into the stinging rays of sunlight with the ease of Master of Puppets-era Metallica or even peak-era Neurosis, its got some good things going on, especially during the sunny, summery jazzlike passages of "Black Forest Hamm." The production can be a little faux kult at times and titles such as "Powerwhorses"
and "Loadbath" suggest that this outfit doesn't take the devil's work as seriously as it does take turning up the grunge and wailing its barbaric yawp from the candlelit caves of the world.
Hard to say that this is the future of metal or that this band will remain in our memories as summer gives way to fall but it's a good enough way to pass 62 minutes, especially for those flirting with the real devil's music.
Track Listing
1. Black Forest Hamm
2. Powerwhorses
3. Loadbath
4. Irreversible
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