Like so many current sludgy metal bands, Flood have a preoccupation with water as an elemental force. However, where most bands explore a similiar sort of epic nautical imagery, the images that Flood conjure up with their debut album Native are all about the destructive power of water's incursion into land. The four songs on this disc ("Aphelion", "Dam", "Atlantis", Water") seem to view water as a destructive leviathan, mirrored in the mysterious old black and white photos of wrecked city streets that are featured on the gatefold jacket, and from the sound of things, Flood seek to mirror this theme with the power of their riffs as well. These San Francisco psych-doomsters have come out with an album of drawn-out space-doom jams that are made up of massive downtuned riffage, thick layers of spacey Hawkwindian electronics and swirling effects, and seriously ponderous tempos that contribute to a couple of these songs exceeding the fifteen minute mark. At first, I had these guys pegged as a straight Electric Wizard clone, but subsequent listens revealed Flood to be a more mutated take on the Wiz's drk druggy space-doom...and these guys load up heavier on the electronic noise and weird noisy textures way more than Electric Wizard ever has. Huge Sabbathian riffs stalk through dense clouds of metallic whir and echo-drenched vocals, the band caught up in a lumbering narcotic stupor, but this is more drugged and woozy than dark and satanic, the sound of Electric Wizard combined with Sleep and the spacey cosmic sludge of Sons Of Otis, a droning narco-metal that actually puts Native pretty close in tone to the first Mammatus album. Along with the recent Meteorcity releases from Snail and Black Pyramids, these guys extrapolate on a time-tested sound and out their own stamp on this sort of heavy, stoned, spaced out psychedelic riffcrush.