I have spoken at length about the incredible talent in my area. From widely celebrated acts like Cloakroom and Locktender to more underground sleepers like analecta and Jagalchi.
Add to that list the juggernauts Arcem from Valparaiso, Indiana, an hour and some change west of me. They offer the sort of massive, sludgy, post-metal that you might expect to hear emanating from Scandinavia, not the small Indiana basement I first heard them in.
I usually try to be pretty discerning with my record purchases. My wantlist always exceeds my budget, so I try to make sure that I’m completely sold on what I’m buying.
But every once in a while, I’ll come upon something like a $10 vinyl sale and just become a madman. I’ll spend an hour or more frantically scrolling, streaming the first few minutes of a record for a sample before making a gut decision.
And thus is how I ended up with Lines Breaking Circles, the debut record from As We Draw, a killer blend of screamo, black metal, hardcore, and sludge.
I’m a relative newcomer to the Baroness faithful. After falling in love with Purple it took me until Gold & Grey to consider diving deeper into their back catalog. Red Album and Yellow & Green were the first and last records I bought in 2020, and that long digestion process convinced me that they were one of the best metal bands going today, offering a confounding blend of sludge metal, progressive rock, psychedelic, folk, and good ol’ fashioned rock ‘n’ roll that is above reproach. The phrase I kept using in those reviews were “they can do no wrong.”
I’ll admit, Stone is the biggest challenge to that assertion that they’ve offered. My first few listens—which I undertook while distracted—were a little underwhelming. I added them to my year end list out of necessity—I only had twenty-three and needed two more to round it out. Whether that was a self fulfilling prophecy or not, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that I ordered it right after publishing that list, thinking, “how bad can it be? It’s friggin’ Baroness.”
And upon giving it a few close listens, I stand by that claim. Stone offers up plenty of their trademark brand of anthemic heavy metal while also stretching further into new sounds.
They say music can soothe the savage beast. But what about the times when the music proves the more beastly of the two? The moments when the feral creature might run for safety from the music that is far more monstrous than it?
If you’re looking for the latter, consider Body Void’s Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth, a positively eldritch piece of sludge metal that leaves no wonder as to why anyone would call a genre that. It’s as black and thick as tar, and just like the thousands of specimens at Le Brea, there is no savage beast that bears a chance of survival.
If there’s one thing the metal community loves, it’s hyperbole. There are thousands of metal records that come out a year, and they are all described with superlatives.
For instance, let’s look at Conjurer, who the internet has decided to call “The Saviors of British Metal.” No matter how hard you roll your eyes at that, Conjurer is rolling theirs harder. They’ve said a few times that they don’t consider themselves to be doing anything all that revolutionary.
Still, listening to Pathós, you might think that the internet hyperbolists are on to something.
Sometimes, you just need some music that will crush you. Times like when you’ve been fighting a weird illness and are sitting at home in a fog of post-blood-draw fatigue as you wait to hear the results of your bloodwork. That’s a highly specific mood, and it’s hardly the only feeling that calls for demolitions-grade heavy music.
But whatever causes that mood to strikes, LLNN is just what the doctor ordered. Unmaker, the third album from the Copenhagen quartet, is a gut-wrenching bit of dark, sludgy metal so hefty that it should come with a lift warning.
Chat Pile doesn’t sound like it would sound very good on paper: sludge punk guitars, 80s-style drum production, and scuzzy bass lines ripping beneath spoken-word diatribes about systemic poverty, grief, critiques of organized religion, and drug-induced hallucinations of Grimace, the McDonald’s character, smoking weed.
To be honest, I’m not sure it sounds that good off of paper either. There’s not much here that sounds beautiful by conventional standards.
But for all its ugliness, there is a power here that cuts through its lack of listenability and lack of hooks and grasps your attention anyway. And if you let it take you, you’re in for quite a ride.
Usually, when artists announce a collaboration, you can make a pretty educated guess as to what the end result might sound like. Take for instance Volcano Choir, the union of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and mathy post rockers Collections of Colonies of Bees, who released music that sounds like Bon Iver playing mathy post rock. Or May Our Chambers Are Full by Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle, which found ERR offering her gothic country vocals over Thou’s relentless sludge.
But then you have projects like Bloodmoon, which unites all of Converge with Chelsea Wolfe, her ubiquitous collaborator Ben Chisholm, and Cave In’s Stephen Brodsky. There isn’t much common ground between the chaotic mathcore, gothic doom, and melodic space metal of the three respective projects to predict what it might sound like.
There’s no low-hanging fruit so ripe that it’s practically picking itself off of the vine. Instead, this album is carefully and laboriously worked. It sounds cultivated, not gathered. And, every drop of sweat was worth it.
When I was first introduced to Mountaineer through their 2020 record Bloodletting, I was instantly enamored. That record is an inspiring bit of gorgeous sludge metal that transcends the emotional resonance of the genre without stretching beyond the sonic conventions laid down by Isis, Cult of Luna, and others.
So when Giving Up the Ghost was announced, I was equal parts excited and apprehensive. Bloodletting felt so singular that it might be impossible to follow up in a satisfying way. Either they make the same record and it winds up boring or they shift the formula of their careful chemistry and it doesn’t reach the same reaction. I actually waited a few weeks after it was released to listen to it because I was so nervous that it wouldn’t live up.
Since I’m reviewing my personal vinyl copy, you could probably deduce that my worries were unfounded.
On 4/20 this past year, I was working on a joke article for Tuned Up called “Blaze It and Praise It: The Stoner-iest Christian(ish) Albums Ever Released.” While brainstorming in the staff Discord, one of the other writers mentioned that A Hope For Home’s last record was basically just a sludge metal record. I hadn’t heard it, so in the spirit of doing good research, I put it on.
In about ten minutes, I was scouring Discogs for a copy, yadda yadda yadda, and here we are.
In Abstraction isn’t just “basically a sludge metal record.” It’s a rich blend of sludge heaviness, post rock atmosphere, and post-hardcore energy that is still fresh.