Framed by episodic vignettes, Jersey Shores is the latest album from Akimbo, a concept album, in fact, that revolves around a series of infamous shark attacks that occured in 1916 off of the coast of New Jersey, a subject that has captured the imagination of the Northwestern sludge rockers for their sixth album (and first for Neurot). The five songs on Jersey Shores weave a chronological, if slightly surreal narrative that describes each of the key events that happened during the horrific shark attacks, which included four deaths and one serious injury. These shark attacks were the inspiration for Benchley's Jaws, and Akimbo spins the story into an equally epic sludge-metal saga with the band's heaviest music to date. Previous albums delivered their manic metallic assaults in short hardcore-style blasts, but now Akimbo lets their songs stretch out into longer, epic jams that sometimes spill out over ten minutes or more, as if the Neurosis influence that's always lurked in the shadows of their thunderous metallic rock has completely come out into the light. "Bruder Vansant" melds together burly stoner rock riffage and aggressively fast tempos with old school metal at first, but then evolves into moody, jazzy post-rock. The eleven minute "Lester Stillwell" is the album's centerpiece, its spacey Karp-like crushrock alternating with bluesy Sabbathy doom before wandering into a twilight field of twangy, Big Sky psychedelia and shuffling blues. The whole album is filled with these long, epic wanderings from punishing heaviness into dark musical calm, blending smoky blues and post-rock with Neurosis-esque dirge, super-heavy Kyuss groove and angular noise rock, and Akimbo are now moving further from the Melvins/Karp comparisons that have saddled these dudes since day one. They still sound very "Pacific Northwest", if you know what I mean, but Jersey Shores has them exploring a whole new side to their sound. Might disappoint fans of their older stuff that are looking for more of their faster, hardcore-injected sound, but Akimbo's newer, improvisational approach to brooding heaviness is pretty damn cool. Comes in slipcase packaging.