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ARGENTINUM ASTRUM  self-titled  CD   (Anti-Corporate Music Inc.)   9.98


Super heavy blackened sludge from Knoxville, Tennessee with some wild noise fuckery that elevates this above the rest of the extreme doom rabble. This 26+ minute disc has just one long untitled song from this young band, and Argentinum Astrum display an enthusiasm for messing around with expectations of what doom metal is supposed to sound like, which ultimately turns this debut into something more than just doom metal. The track starts off with a cloud of black, buzzing feedback, then lurches into a slow, Khanate-like riff, but instead of moving forward with the riff, the music gets all warped and chewed up and dropping out completely, like you're listening to the band on a cassette and the tape is being eaten by the tape deck, the slurred sludgey guitars become a mangled blurt of analogue squelch, starting and stopping, winding down into silence and then revving back up again, until the riff finally disappears completely and is replaced by a single strummed guitar and spacious, laid back drum beat surrounded by tendrils of feedback and amp buzz. It gets heavy again soon enough, building back into a crushing minimalist riff chugging in slow motion, weird pterodactyl shrieks soaring over the desolate doomscape, and those vocals sound totally fucked, wrecked and wretched. They remind of how messed up and shrill the singer from Fleurety sounded on their demos.

The track moves onward, shifting between lumbering, monotonous sludge and slightly faster riffs that have a vague southern feel, then into brief blasts of epic, damaged black metal where the drums seem to float in and out of focus, or simply disappear together for a second. From there it's back to the slow sludge, a different riff this time, then the drums exit the scene again and we're left with nothing but guitars, black and roiling as ultra slow motion riffs unfurl over a caustic ocean of low-end grind, super abstract and droning, with those weird fucked-up reptile screams rising up out of the background. This monolithic metallic dronescape is spread out for more than ten minutes, then drums gradually re-enter the picture and once again the band shifts gears, lurching this time into a drunken bluesy sludge jam a la Weedeater or Eyehategod that closes the track out. These guys have an eclectic style that sounds like a couple of different bands stuck together with the unifying factor being the insane echo-chamber shrieking, a blackened sludgemutant built from scraps of Black Boned Angel, Fleurety, and Eyehategod, bashing out their primitive, noise-damaged sludge on busted amplifiers and broken guitars, electronic noise detritus dripping from their instruments, swampy low-frequency buzz infesting their blasted boogie.


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