Last years Legendary Demo disc introduced Clouds as a manic conglom of hardcore punk, sludgy stoner grooves, some proggy tendencies and loads of heavy-duty bloozy boogie headed up by Adam McGrath, one of the guitarists from legendary metalcore pioneers Cave In. There was a sloppy, distinct 70's rock vibe in both the songwriting and the swaggering delivery of the tunage on that album that referenced everything from Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart to Sabbath and dub that a bunch of us with a taste for quirky stoner rock grooved on, but which appeared to pass by the rest of the metal/stoner crowd. Now, this follow up album raises their game significantly and sounds like they've been hard at work over the past year honing their sound and coming up with a sound that's just as riff-heavy and rocking as before, but is now injected with a major dose of sludgy metallic heaviness and honest-to-goodness pop songwriting that I never saw comin'. The opening song "Empires In Basements" kicks this off with a massively heavy sludge jam with some gooey Melvins style riffage and a killer anthemic hook that sounds a LOT like Torche; "Feed The Horse" follows that up with an upbeat, spacey metallic rock jam, once again reminding me of Torche but with a bouncy sing-along chorus way more bouyant than you'd hear from Torche. And then "The Bad Seat" throws a weird curveball, a swinging staccato pop song complete with piano, sounding like New Pornagraphers more than anything? "Heisenberg Says" is all ferocious garage rock stomp and

freaked out soloing with squiggly electronic noises flying all over the place, and "Motion Of The Ocean" returns to the crush with a blast of fierce thrashing motormetal. Clouds throw it all together, the huge power-chord laden choruses and anthemic singalongs, chunks of sludge rock and frenzied Karp style heaviness, spacey psychedelia and dramatic pop weirdness, shades of later Cave In and even Pink Floyd, all wrapped up into a colossal sludgepop epic that fans of Torche and Floor and super-heavy metallic catchiness will LOVE.