��The latest album of grim, gargantuan slow-motion psychedelia from UK doomdrone demons Bong, Stoner Rock is obviously a tongue-in-cheek gesture from the band, poking fun at the unimaginative would-be music critics out there in webland and their feeble attempts at discussing and describing the band's music. You'd be hard pressed to find anything remotely "rocking" on a Bong album. The gorgeously evocative cover for Stoner Rock keeps up with the band's tradition of fantastic, Weird Tales-like album art, calling up visions of lost worlds, antediluvian religious sects, and ancient cyclopean architectures, an atmosphere of dark weird fantasy set to Bong's massive glacial psychedelia, formed around the vast rumble of severely downtuned guitars and crushing ritualistic drone. It's so much better than just another boring Sunn-clone, though, as these guys immerse their sound in immense layers of sonic delirium that draws equally from Indian classical influences, the electronic dreamworlds of German space music, even the meditative minimalism of Harold Budd and La Monte Young.

�� As with previous releases, Bong carve out two massive side-long tracks, expanding cloudscapes of rumbling ritualistic amplifier drone and downtuned guitar grind that sprawl out for well over half an hour each. The first, "Polaris", emerges amid an oceanic current of Sunn-esque amp-drift and massive bass tones that undulate in slow, casual movements deep in the mix, forming into a gorgeous wash of heavily layered low-frequency ambience. As that stoned smog formation slowly spreads out, deep chant-like vocals briefly appear, a half-spoken incantation that sounds like some malefic High Priest in the midst of ceremonial magick. A halting drumbeat starts to take form, a glacial plod that echoes in the background, bringing an agonizingly slow funeral procession feel to the music. By halfway through the track, you don't even realize that the titanic ur-chord that rumbled forth from the beginning of the song has made a subtle, elegant evolution into the haunting riff that now begins to grind across the latter half of the side, riding on waves of onyx synthdrift, vast kosmische Tangerine Dream-like drones that ripple through the lightless expanse. Surges of choral drift and deep wordless chanting loom out of the depths, later peeling back to reveal faint traces of spectral piano-like melody that tumbles endlessly through the fog.

�� The other track is only slightly more propulsive, the molten roar of a distorted power chord heralding the beginning of "Out Of The Aeons", which almost immediately shambles forward in a delirium of drone-metal riffage and syrupy sauropod drumming. No slow build to satori here, as the band erupts into a mesmeric mixture of sitar-like scales and damaged bluesy leads, all buried within the band's gargantuan psych-groove. On this song, Bong lulls the listener into a crushing, titanic trance with a rumbling heaviness that almost resembles a Sleep song that has been slowed down to half-speed, and then enshrouded in a cloud of raga-like drones and cosmic light.

�� Comes in digipack packaging.