The sludge metal trio Dukatalon might come from Israel, but their ugly tarpit crush is very familiar to us. The gooey ultra-heavy riffage, savage screams and grinding battle-ram pacing reminds me of something halfway between the crusty Southern blooze metal of Sourvein and Weedater, and hearing High On Fire's Surrounded By Thieves being played at half speed. If that sounds like an appealing formula to you, then by Christ do you need to hear Saved By Fear. The band first released their debut on the small Israeli based label Sleeping Village Records last year but it was just picked up by Relapse for worldwide release, who also fixed the album up with new artwork from the skillful hands of Orion Landau.

Dukatalon's music is vicious stuff, huge syrupy crushing riffs grinding relentlessly over waves of oily feedback and saurian drumming, and captured with Billy Anderson's thick, meaty production that amps up all of the low-end as usual. The droning, partially chanted growls can at times remind me of Al from Sleep/Om, but there's lots of feral screaming as well. And man, whenever they downshift from the bone-crushing mid paced riffs into slower, skull-flattening bulldoze enormousness; the effect is pretty goddamn impressive. Like I mentioned, a lot of Southern bloozy boogie creeps into Dukatlon's music, and the pioneering sludge of Eyehategod is an obvious influence. But the band injects this with some well timed eruptions of speed like on the closer "Mekonenet" where they take off into fast paced thrash for a minute before doing a sudden turn into punishing dirge; some cool melodic touches are employed as well, namely on the nine minute saga "Electric Site", which features jubilant clusters of sky-climbing guitar that rise uip over the quicksand doom for a few minutes like a Sleep jam shot up with amphetamines. The one spot where the album takes a breather from all of this crushing heaviness is on the title track, an acoustic instrumental that sounds strangely like something off of Led Zeppelin IV.

These guys might not bring anything new to the world of sludgy slow motion metal, but it's righteously pulverizing, especially when cranked to wall shaking levels of volume. Recommended for fans of Thou, Weedeater, Salome, etc.