This Denver power trio has been creating some pretty crushing sludge rock for several years now, pretty much flying under the larger radar of the sludge/doom/noise rock scene but serving up a thick Melvinsy lava stomp that fans of slow and warped heaviness would dig. Curtains, with it's weird, distorted album art that looks like something off of a lost 70's progressive rock LP, is the recently released follow up to the band's 2004 album Loadstone, is seperated into several "acts", with the first 8 songs focusing on huge angular riffs and megaheavy guitar/bass thud, odd rhythms and sudden time signature changes, and Bailey's burly bellow that sounds like a cross between King Buzzo and a 'roid raging lumberjack. One of the things that I liked about their last album was how they mixed in interludes of extended droning feedback and deep, rumbling loops of industrialized distortion, and there's more of that here as well. It's hard not to notice how much of an influence Stoner Witch era Melvins has on Core Of The Earth's sound, but they rock this style well, creating a terrifically trippy, CRUSHING slab of detuned sludge rock. At the end of the album, however, the heavy rhythmic pummel gives way to 'Curtains' and 'Credits'; together, these two tracks are over 18 minutes of experimental, improvised drones, meandering metal-scrape, darkly ambient electronic waves floating through a mocturnal concrete wasteland, with John Carpenter style keyboards and the occasional splattery sludge riff rising up from the rumbling, unsettling dronescape.