Emma Ruth Rundle has spent most of her career on the fringes of the metal scene. Besides playing guitar in prog/post-metal band Red Sparowes, the gothic folk of her solo work and Nocturnes and the spacey ambience of Marriages has always had a darkness that can’t totally be called metal, but it doesn’t quite fit outside of it.
Similarly, the thick, tar-throated sludge of Baton Rouge’s Thou has always coated over a tender melodic heart that would escape most listeners, buried as it was beneath layers of molten guitar.
On paper, there’s little in common between the two. But the collaborative album May Our Chambers Be Full proves that the two entities have much more in common than you might think.
My love affair with Baroness wasn’t an immediate one. Even after becoming a fan, it took me a while to be fully convinced.
Speaking of 
For the last six years, post metal heroes 
If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’re already well aware that I have a very soft spot for a particular kind of heavy, glacial, melodic sludge metal (see: 
When I first stumbled upon the wonderful post-hardcore supergroup 
Generally, when a band is signed to a major label, they tend to smooth out their sound a little bit.