If you are looking for looking for the really sick boogie, you've gotta look to Finland. Those drugonauts are putting out some of the best sludge and doom metal around right now, of a grade a damn sight higher than the persistant Isis aping that we have polluting all corners of our underground metal scene over here. Enough already, for chrissake's. Between Fleshpress, Lahdon Aika, Loinen, Stumm, Grang, and Paganus, Finland is where it is at. You can add Frogskin to the list, now, too. They sent me a demo a few years ago that was solid sludgecore, it didn't rewrite the book or anything and owed alot to the Southern swamp metal of Eyehategod and Sourvein, but it made for a good spin. And I loved their band name, and still do. There's something weird and ghastly about it, and it perfectly fits their brand of swampy witch doom. Well, fast forward two years later and they now have a new limited edition LP on the new Finnish imprint Liekehtiva Vuohi, and boy is it a crusher. I can still pick out Frogskin's DNA as I sit here and let their hulking black swamp slime flow over me, but the band has assimilated their influences into a pretty powerful sound that is, at the very least, goddamn bonegrinding in it's heaviness. Frogskin have essentially combined the sleazy drugsludge of Eyehategod with the nightmarish doom of Burning Witch via blackened Sabbathian riffage, spurts of NOLA boogie that clambers through the muck, and gear shifts into even slower, lower levels of blakkk doom. The singer sounds like he's pretty unhinged; emitting a stream of croaks, panicky screams, and weird wordless utterances, he goes for the same kind of psychosis that Edgy 69 perfected on Rift.Canyon.Dreams. It's not as intense, obviously - Edgy was and still remains one of the most distinctive voices in underground metal ever - but that demonic caterwauling fits perfectly with Frogskin's diseased, bloated atmosphere. The first side features two songs, "Dust Owl" and "Necklace Of Snakes", both nasty, billious blasts of greasy doom and feedback-infested riffage, and some very cool melodic textures are worked into the music that give it an epic quality, especially when the soaring, funereal lead guitars kick in at the end of "Necklace". My favorite part of this record though is the b-side, the sidelong "Ghostship" that stretches out for something like twenty minutes and moves from majestic glacial sludge with even more melodic guitars cruising over a monstrous riff, into a lengthy free-noise jam where the band conjures up a big fat cloud of black feedback, amp rumble, scraping metal, and other abrasion. After about six minutes of droning feedback trance, the band kicks back into the metal, this time with a different riff, a mudcaked crawl through an Electric Wizard style psychdoom dirge, megaheavy and repetitive and surrounded by howling amplifiers.

Grisly, filthy doom that those of you into the Finnish sludge scene, Electric Wizard, EyeHateGod, Noothgrush, Toadliquor, Iron Monkey, Grief, Corrupted, Sourvein, Thou, and Burning Witch will probably go apeshit over. The record was pressed on black vinyl, comes in a green/black jacket with rad artwork, and has been issued in a limited edition of 500 copies.