Talk about heavy. These three Belgian fellows bust out their third album Materia, and this about the closest that anyone has gotten to

effectively reanimating the quirky crushing mindfuck sludge of early Melvins. Yep, Blutch sounds alot like early Melvins, there's no denying that,

but to me this seems like less of an appropriation of the master's style and more like a pitch-black doppelganger of the Melvins, a sludgier and more

menacing sounding rework of the Melvin's indie sludgerock. It certainly doesn;t hurt that singer Djinn Alaimo succeeds in taking King Buzzo's whispered croon

and creeps it out even further, hissing like some back alley dopefiend crawling through the gutter; it's a harrowing vocal performance that ups the evil

quotient on this disc tenfold. And the riffage is BROOTAL, lurching around with the weird offtime angularity of Ozma and Bullhead (just

check out the beginning of "The Black Caped Man"....holy shit...), but like I said, this is alot heavier, the guitar massively

downtuned to Floor-like levels of bomb-string-flop, the drummer flailing like a spastic trapped in amber, the band getting even slower and more doomed as the

album progresses. As if it couldn't get any creepier and more threatening, they pull these killer stunts like opening "Masamune" with the childlike humming

of a lullaby drifting out of a drainage pipe, and closing out the song "Moving Ground" with some genuinely diseased sounding wheezing whispers that make my

fuckin' skin crawl. Awesome, AWESOME sludge, as heavy and bonecrushing as you could possibly hope for. Blutch wrap up the whole aural mugging with the nearly

10-minute "Confutatis", a rich dronescape of echoing splattery percussion and rumbling feedback blackness, and total horror-movie vocal chorales and monk

chanting rising out of the amplifier muck. Imagine Earth 2 or Sunn O)))'s 00 Void melted over fragments of the original Omen

score. What the fuck. Materia has actually been out for awhile in Europe, having been released as an LP through Delboy Records, but it's

just now emerging here in the States through the ever-crushing At A Loss imprint, the label that also recently released the Bestial album from

Blutch's European tourmates Black Cobra. Devestating! This domestic version of Materia comes in a digipack with weird, high-contrast artwork. Highly

recommended !!