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BASTARD OF THE SKIES  Tarnation  CD   (Future Noise)   12.98


Oozing with bilious British aggression and a thick streak of Am Rep-informed ugliness, Tarnation is the first album that we've gotten in from this UK tarpit outfit, their third overall; these guys won me over fast once I started spinning this ten song disc, spooling out an evil-sounding, somewhat angular brand of sludge-metal that does a pretty good job at combining the droning, discordant crush of Neurosis with a monstrous strain of metallic noise rock, all with a powerful vocalist who delivers an interesting mixture of hoarse screaming and a gruff, near-whispered croon that shows up in a couple of songs throughout the disc. This is super heavy stuff, crushing magma riffage that lurches and stomps along at a mostly driving mid-tempo lurch, and they keep the songs centered around those massive riffs that are heaped onto the heavy, pummeling tribal rhythms and the jagged, spiky song arrangements. Bastard Of The Skies only occasionally dips into the slower, more doom-laden tempos, though when they do slow things down it turns into some massively ugly saurian sludge. The singer's monstrous vocals are at times reminiscent of Rennie from Starkweather, which add a bit of a psychotic feel to their music, and within the long serpentine sludge workouts, the band also incorporates some subtle bits of minimal dark ambience and droning industrial noise in between the songs. There's also some more experimental improvisation that appears on the title track, where things get a little more abstract; this long, sprawling piece turns into a free-form drone workout that gets swept up in black waves of formless feedback and amp-drift that crash over the drummer's heavy, improvised caveman pummel. The whole thing is draped in a kind of apocalyptic darkness, all the way until the end, when the band veers into the bright, major key riffage of the last song that cracks through the gloom with some big melodic hooks that sort of sound like a mathier version of Torche or the Melvins, joined in with howling guest vocals from members of Scottish sludge demons Black Sun. Its another solid entry in the recent spate of crazed, super-heavy sludge metal that's been coming in from the UK lately, worth checking out if you've been digging the likes of Art Of Burning Water and Black Sun. Comes in digipack packaging.


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