The European vinyl edition of Batillus's latest album, Concrete Sustain.

New York sludge metallers Batillus have always displayed a heavy industrial influence in their slow-motion down-tuned crush, but with their latest album Concrete Sustain, the band pursues this aspect of their sound into new areas that finds them developing into something much more unique and distinctive. Their debut was ridiculously heavy, but here they've evolved into something more spacious, more percussive, with heavy doses of early industrial metal coursing through the black veins of these songs, guided by the pressurized pneumatic power of the rhythm section.

Right from the start, Batillus bludgeon the listener with the staccato sludge metal riffage and strangely funky drumming of "Concrete", the rhythm almost like a fractured breakbeat, while the riffage is crushing, down-tuned and droning, chunks of rumbling syrupy crush chugging over the evolving industro-groove of the rhythm section, the synthesizers swelling up into swarms of trippy, interstellar electronics. It's goddamn killer, and definitely different from the previous Batillus stuff that I've listened to, a definite Godflesh influence looming over the band's terminally bleak grooves. When "Cast" picks up after that, it drops another monstrous mechanical groove, the music deceptively simple, another droning riff welded to a strangely twitchy backbeat, super heavy and utterly grim, the music synching up perfectly with the abject lyrics and their vision of psychological collapse beneath the weight of the end-times. But then "Beset" crashes in, all slow-motion lava-flow of molten black sludge and glacial tempos, and anyone aching for that ultra-crawling heaviness heard on their debut Furnace will feel right at home. Mournful, melodic riffs poured over the rumbling buzzsaw bass and spacious pounding of the drums, a delicate delay-soaked guitar lead rising up over the doom-laden heaviness and monstrous gaseous growls, the song dropping into stretches of synth-glazed slowcore. Gorgeously bleak stuff. The band picks up the pace on "Mirrors", whose driving repetitive riff coils tightly around the guts of the song, layered with controlled bursts of electronic noise and eerie guitar before each new eruption into the pummeling chorus, where a crushing two-note riff is backed by the distant clank of metal and swirling black drift. "Rust" returns to that Godfleshy groove for a bit, dropping more ultra-heavy lurching sludge over a brutal stop/start rhythm, and by this point it's starting to feel like Batillus are tapping into a certain strain of industrialized sludge that I haven't heard in ages, some real heavy whiffs of primo NYC skum-crunch a la Helmet or Unsane starting to emanate off of this record. And then they head into the miserable closer "Thorns", and it's pure dour doom, sorrowful leads slithering over glacial tar-pit dirge, deep chanting vocals drifting over top, a moving, dramatic finale to Concrete Sustain's slo-mo dystopian requiem.

Limited to five hundred copies.