Also available on limited edition vinyl in a heavy gatefold jacket, three sides to the vinyl, the fourth blank, and comes with a code that allows you to access a digital download of the album.

If there's a more onerous term than "post rock" or "stoner rock", it's gotta be "post hardcore". I hardly ever hear anyone use that term anymore, since it was already pretty much stripped of any real meaning by the mid-90's. When albums from bands that were as divergent as Iceburn Collective, Quicksand, Engine Kind and Texas Is The Reason were all being catagorized as post-hardcore, it was clear that it didn't mean anything anymore, and had become as useless as describing a band as "grunge". Which makes it hard to explain how amazing this new album from Disappearer is, because all that keeps popping into my head as I listen to this is how much these guys remind me of that whole post-hardcore scene of the early 90's. Argh! To be specific, there's something in Disapperer's sound that reminds me of that whole scene that came out of the Revelation Records camp, the bands that ex-youth crew kids were starting up now that they wanted to play alt rock, and which still ended up sounding so much heavier and more aggressive than anything else in indie rock back then. But Disappearer tap into that sound and take those bits of Quicksand and Engine Kid DNA and inject them into massive metallic sludge-rock, something WAY heavier than those bands combined. The Clearing took me by surprise, because their previous EP didn't sound anything like this...

That EP that came out almost four years ago on Trash Art was a solid little slab of metallic sludge from a couple of members of Doomriders and There Were Wires, with just hints of the spacey epic rock that is inb full bloom here, but more focused on crushing downtuned heaviness sculpted into dramatic arrangements that hinted at a combined influence of Mogwai and Neurosis. Good stuff, but not groundbreaking. Fast forward to 2009, when the band finally follows that up with their first full length, and it's immediately apparent that something most definitely changed with the band, their huge metallic riffing now infused with soaring melodies, streaks of spacey guitar and dense melodic chords formed into majestic hooks that can be found on every single song on here...

There's powerful singing, rough and gritty but with TONS of emotion, a tuneful bellow that echoes across the pummeling, propulsive sludge rock, and every song has this moody, somber feel, which reveals the apparent love for Joy Division that the members of Disappearer share. Just look to the song "Glassland" for proof, a mighty gloom-pop epic with gloomy melodic guitars and an unmistakeable 80's post-punk/goth influence underneath the crushing heaviness. That song has become one of my favorite songs of the summer, spinning it over and over here in the C-Blast office...if bands like this had singles, this would be it. And the rest of the album is just as catchy and heavy, a bunch of the songs sounding like a mix of Jawbox and Karp and Melvins ("A Skull Full Of Bats", "Dissolve", "Villainous Moon"), especially "Nausea", which really reminds me of a crushing metallic Jawbox song. Then there's the slower brooding instrumental "Etched", all doused in soaring space rock guitars and pummeling slow-motion groove, and the monstrous dirge of "Obsidian", which alternates mathy guitars with pounding droning riffage.

It's not just that their melodic in their approach, either. There are plenty of bands that heard Torche and decided they too could write "pop" songs. But these melodies are fucking great, matched with solid songwriting that really turns this into a cogent whole and not just a collection of mindlessly sludgy jams. Disappearer reinvented themselves here into something terrific, taking the best parts of contempo sludge metal and classic post-punk and, yeah, some of the 90's "post-hardcore" sound of Quicksand and combining it all into a devestating, deeply moving slab of underground rock that is as heavy and catchy as Torche or Harvey Milk without sounding like either band. Do I really need to tell you? Highly recommended!