Passing Times is the album that led up to Facedowninshit hooking up with metal giant Relapse, and it's easy to see what had the esteemed label stoked...on this 2003 album, the (then) North Carolina based outfit reached beyond the sludge and stoner rock and crust tags that they have been given since their formation to become a gnarly, attitudinal fusion of all of those sounds, a bratty apocalyptic battle cry, equal parts anarchist punk agitation, heavily stoned negativism, and deformed metallic fury. These eight songs combine spastic blasting grindcore, guitar-heavy southern rock, galloping 80's metal, apocalyptic dirges, and filthy noise rock, a ragged, skuzzy hybrid of His Hero Is Gone, Unsane, midwestern noise rockers Hammerhead, Today Is The Day and Neurosis with a healthy dose of southern boogie that infects some of their slower moments. Album opener "Island" opens with a bit of ambient feedback before it erupts into doomy sludge rock with sweeping black winds of electronic ambience and caustic hardcore riffing. Brutal metallic noise rock and desperate hardcore punk collide on the jagged, thrashing "Eyeless", and "Interlude" combines a somber piano melody with soft swells of guitar and dark ambience, a gloomily gorgeous passage of spacey post-rock that explodes into the galloping metal and doomed noise rock of "Washed Away". The rest of the disc continues this back and forth between gnarly, punky AM Rep noise rock and crusty metal with those feral screaming vocals, atmospheric noise and seriously pissed anti-authoritarian lyrics, all the up until the final track "Twilight" that ends the album on a pounding, utterly doomed note. Presented in a six-panel digipack.