This southern trio has members of C-Blast faves Collapsar and Icepick Revival, and that pedigree had me assumin' that the debut album from The Devil And The Sea was going to be some kind of crunchy math metal workout. Once the opening song "Batwing" enters, though, I'm smashed over the head with a beefy sludge rock assault contaminated with the greasiest Am Rep swagger. This is super heavy skuzzy sludge/doom metal lashed with bloozy Southern rock riffage, monolithic deathmarch droning, some occasional mathy riffing that betrays their prog-metal background, and a real unhealthy love for visceral amplifier feedback. One minute, these guys are belting out some brutish Unsane style distorto riffage, feedback soaked and chugging, then they'll spin off into raging sabbathian trudge and New Orleans style sludge, or slow it down even further into a punishing tectonic crawl. The vocals sound like there are a couple of guys all howling together at the same time, screaming tortured blood prayers at the heavens. Total wreckage. And these guys really do love feedback...squealing, screaming amplifiers open songs, end songs, invade the spaces between riffs, and give the music on Heart Vs Spine an added queasiness. The last track "Abra Cadaver" takes this to the extreme, an eighteen minute avant-garde collage of psychedelic backwards guitars, demonic screams and crazed muttering, massive blasts of splattery doom metal being sucked into a wormhole, evil organ drones, and LOTS of abstracted feedback noise. A killer album that mixes together bits of Unsane, Eyehategod, Corrupted, Jesus Lizard, and Don Cabellero into contorted sludge. Weird, Baizley-ish artwork rounds out another crusher from the Acerbic camp.