�� Hailing from all the way up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Crosss are a newer band who bring us a weird kind of trippy, warped sludge rock on their debut Obsidian Spectre. The band blends strange spectral visions and tar-soaked melodies into a very cool, rather unique sound that, if I had to give you some rough coordinates for their sound, falls somewhere in between low-fi indie rock and the melody-laced sludge of Harvey Milk, Godstopper, Winters and even Nirvana. Please don't mistake those references to mean that this album isn't monstrously heavy, though. Their LP opens with the song "Lucky Loki", which comes lurching off the black grooves, hammering out a strange, stoned sound that seems to blend together 60's era bubblegum psych hooks and clanking slow-motion riffage and sends it all rumbling forth on a blanket of murky, reverb-drenched sludgepunk creep and serpentine hooks. The vocals are clear, sung through clouds of reverb, and the whole thing has this weird vibe that feels like you might be listening to some long-forgotten garage recording of drugged sludge metallers Sleep doing covers of old Pixies songs; the song "Scared Cow" in particular has that odd indie-pop meets lysergic sludge sound. There are plenty of other catchy songs on here, too, like "Smoke" and "Witching Hour" with their weird chant-like vocal melodies winding around the droning guitars and sludgy garage psych, the singer sometimes shifting into an ominous croon, or building into an eerie vocal harmony. The band's lumbering, saurian grooves are met with equally zonked guitar parts that range from droning, sitar-like melodies to bursts of feedback-drenched soloing and clouds of billowing amplifier noise. It's a peculiar and intoxicating din that these guys have coughed up on Obsidian Spectre, sort of like hearing some sludgy early 90's grunge-pop outfit performing their own score for Invocation Of My Demon Brother. There's seven songs of that stuff on the first side, while the other side features one song, the twenty minute "Will-O'-The-Wisp", and it's a whole 'nother beast. A sidelong sprawl of bleary psychedelia, filled with discordant chords ringing out over slow-moving clouds of dungeon reverb, while the drums drop in and out, a gorgeous sun-blasted expanse of abstract instrumental guitar scorch and shambling half-formed grooves. It'll start to surge into a kind of propulsive energy every few minutes, almost seeming to build into some sort of krautrockesque rhythmic chug for a moment, but then the music collapses back into the meandering, minor key blues-wreckage, glacial wah-pedal freak-outs and floating guitar feedback that stretch out across the recording, as the rest of the side builds into this tumultuous drone rock epic that just kind of implodes into a gorgeous din of lugubrious psychedelic fuzz at the very end. Pretty great, anyone into the more melodic side of sludge rock and noise rock would do well to give these guys a listen.