Bones Brigade slows down their usual mach-10 pace for the debut album from Aguirre, a French band that channels the negative gooey sludgecore vibes of Iron Monkey and Eyehategod and puts their own frantic hardcore edge on that sound. Calvaire had been released on vinyl a while back on the Blind Date label, but appears here for the first time on cd. Like both Iron Monkey and Eyehategod, there's a seething viciousness at the center of Aguirre's four lengthy bitter slow-motion diatribes that make up this album, easily traceable back to the member's collective background in the French hardcore scene; the songs on Calvaire use the slow, sludgy heaviness as a starting point for songs that often break into galloping mid-paced thrash a la High On Fire, or frenzied and chaotic passages that remind me of His Hero Is Gone and the French Canadian hardcore scene from the late 90's (Ire, Union Of Uranus, One Eyed God Prophecy, etc), which is something that I don't hear too often anymore. But mostly this is rooted in pounding, crusty, droning sludge, usually centering around a single grinding sludge riff with lots of dissonant chords, a thick dank hellish atmosphere hanging low over the songs, the introspective lyrics (sung in both French and English) leaning towards the nihilistic and delivered through a combination of deep emotive screams and higher pitched screams and anguish-wracked wailing. Heavy stuff, with half of the album going for epic song lengths of ten minutes or more, with just one song going in what could be described as a melodic direction; �[�]� is one of the slowest songs on the album, but there's a doleful melodic undercurrent that appears throughout the song that at times reminds me of Harvey Milk. That's definitely the exception though; the rest of this is malevolent and ugly, and closer to the likes of Cavity, Iron Monkey, Graves At Sea and early Overmars. A solid debut of sinister metallic sludge presented in digipack packaging and limited to 500 copies.