���� Available as both a professionally manufactured CDR in nice gatefold packaging, and pro-pressed cassette.

���� In a short period of time, this DC area band went from being a serviceable sludge metal outfit to one of the region's heaviest purveyors of saurian deathdoom. I'd seen them live several times, but somewhere along the line it was as if someone had flipped a switch; the last time I caught Foehammer live, I was absolutely flattened by the sheer gravitational pull of their music. What had once been a filthy enough take on molten, screeching sludge had evolved into a gut-rupturing, utterly abject strain of ultra-doom that seems to fall somewhere in between the apocalyptic mega-crush of Winter, Warhorse or Corrupted, and a death metal version of Weedeater on massive amounts of barbiturates.

���� On the band's eponymous debut, Foehammer drags the listener through three sprawling tracks of that slimy, bloated sludge metal, combining their crawling downtuned riffs and plodding, tar-drenched tempos with visions of dark Tolkein-esque fantasy and Nordic mythology, Luciana Nedelea's album art almost Burzumic in it's mysterious, monochrome shades. Evoking the rumble of giants moving across ice-capped mountain ranges, the songs slowly unfurl titanic riffs that stretch out for ten minutes or more, as hypnotic as anything in this realm, but with some seriously putrefied guttural vocals that waft up out of the depths, and a bass guitar tuned so low that it sounds like the goddamn strings are flopping against the instrument. Sinister space rock effects swoop out of the gloom, blasts of abrasive flange that wash over the immense low-end thud, and that monstrous droning riffage will suddenly shift into a deranged sort of bluesiness, a sickly Sabbathoid lead stumbling out of the oppressive rumbling murk. Whenever a riff does change (which can take ages to occur), it's like a seismic movement, the weight of it feels like the earth shifting beneath your feet. By the time the get to the final track "Jotnar", the main riff gets so stretched apart that it seems to crumble in front of them, everything slowed down to an agonizing, halting lurch, before reforming into one last skull-rattling power-dirge at the end that ultimately disappears into a swarm of distorted noise.

���� It's not like Foehammer are deviating from the lumbering sludge metal sound that we've been inundated with over the past decade, but they pull it off better than most, crafting massive, blackened grooves and waves of bone-crushing low-frequency sound that are as heavy as you could possibly hope for - along with those mutants in Fortress, these guys are pounding out the heaviest, filthiest doom in the DC area.