Just got the latest CD reissue of the band's self titled 2009 debut back in stock; Bong are one of the best bands out there right now deconstructing Sabbath's end-time deathmarch into its most potent residual matter, and in just the past few years have become high priests of psychedelic sludge in their native UK. The band crafts a massive, earth-shaking sound that takes the blackened drugged out doom of Dopethrone, stretches it out and strips it down into an even heavier psilocybin -fueled delirium of slow-motion riffage, elephantine percussion and utterly wasted vocal excess, smeared with the sounds of classical Indian instruments like sitar and shahi baaja to evoke a raga-like feel within their churning drugdoom.

Bong's self-titled debut first came out as a limited edition LP a few years ago, featuring the two monolithic side long songs "Wizards Of Krull" and "The Starlit Grotto"; much like the mighty 'Wiz, the guys in Bong are obviously heavy into the same mixture of influences, bringing together elements of classic weird literature and dark fantasy, Indian classical music, extended droning metal jams and immense down-tuned heaviness to create their hypnotic lumbering sound. With the CD format, these original tracks are now presented in untruncated form, unhindered by the space restrictions of the original vinyl release, and are joined by a third bonus track "Asleep" which itself runs nearly twenty minutes in length. Their intoxicating blend of surreal black fantasy and rumbling saurian psychedelia swings into full gear here.

The first song "Wizards Of Krull" opens up with the band lurching into their signature slow motion sludginess, the drummer pounding away slowly but furiously behind the guitarist's billowing fog of wah-drenched soloing and spaced-out effects overload. Those guitars end up soaring waaaay out into Hawkwind-style space-psych territory, and turn this crushing behemoth riff into a kind of sinister slo-mo space rock in no time. After awhile, those riffs start to mutate into something more sinuous and serpentine, warped snake-charmer guitars winding around the simple, droning riffage. The whole sound is wreathed in heavy doses of reverb and echo, a spacious recording quality giving you the impression that you are right there in the room with the band has they summon up this amorphous black fog of heaviness, and when the vocals drop in, they materialize as a distant monotone chant that hovers in the background, a near wordless moan that drifts vaporously over the psychmetal crush, eventually disappearing into a stoned haze of improvised percussive clatter and rumbling amplifier drones.

When they pick back up with "The Starlit Grotto", it's with a minimal haze of soft amplifier hum and droning bass guitar notes, all abstract and rumbling psych-guitar drift floating through the band's black ether. The distorted drones undulate beneath the sounds of scraped guitar strings and scattered percussion, the track sprawling out into an expanse of near formless improvised amp-drone. After nearly ten minutes of that gloriously hypnotic rumble, though, the band eventually begins to coalesce into another one of their monstrous doom-riffs, the sound coming together slowly and gradually, shifting out of that vast rumbling raga-style buzz into an ominous Sabbathian crush; it's doesn't quite crash in with that heavier riff, but rather subtly transforming into an equally delirious groove that becomes slowly infused with the hypnotic twang of sitar-like strings and those deep chant-like vocals, billowing out even further into a psychedelic mass of sound at the end. A cacophony of spaced out drones and wild, fluttering flute-like melodies, crazed wah-drenched acid guitar meandering out beyond the edges of starlight, a monstrous shambling psychedelia, a subterranean ayahuasca ritual.

And then there's that last track "Asleep", pure molten heaviness pouring from yet another simple, crushing doom riff that the band plays into infinity, a lumbering, ramshackle hypno-sludge jam surrounded by more of that twangy sitar buzz and faint bursts of psychedelic guitar, a massive elliptical narco-crawl that slips into planet-devouring quasars of wah-pedal overload and crushing black synthesizer, about as terrible and tar-covered a space rock jam as you will ever hear...

Another massive slab of crucial, glacial drug-metal from these trogs, highly recommended. Comes in a four panel digipack.