Much like Bell Witch's new album Four Phantoms, the beginning of the latest album from London-based drums n' bass guitar duo Ghold excavates chunks of moody, almost Codeine-esque slowcore from a roiling lava-pit of crushing sludge-encrusted heaviness, fusing delicate moodiness to blasts of droning, majestic metal. Hadn't heard anything else from these guys before picking up Of Ruin, but I was stomped thoroughly flat by the opener "Saw The Falling", which soothes you with its spare, shadowy strum and plaintive prettiness that's vaguely reminiscent of those aforementioned slowcore masters circa White Birch. But from there, the album moves in a weirder direction; when these guys finally cave in, it's with a roar of lurching, metallic power that evokes the likes of classic Melvins, all seething slow-burn malevolence and weird whispered threats, the riffs contorted into more monstrously angular forms. There's a rawness to the production that puts you right there in the room with Ghold, reverberating with the seismic shifts that occur whenever these guys suddenly lurch into one of their faster-paced riffs or odd time signatures.

     But as heavily influenced by the Melvins as this music is, Ghold builds on that with their own array of sonic quirks, which produces something darker, mathier, more fucked-up, with an undercurrent of barbarian prog lurking throughout Of Ruin, from the weirdly distant multi-tracked howls that sound like a chorus of lumberjacks at the bottom of an abandoned well and those awesome, almost operatic metal vocals that come out of nowhere, to the winding, almost motorik grooves that some of these songs slip into; like a lot of the stuff on this label, there's a real sinister psychedelic vibe to Ghold's music, especially on the latter half where a tenor saxophone rears it's head, emitting bleary, wailing drones that resemble the distant shriek of air raid sirens, smeared across the horizon of Ghold's thunderous rumblescape. But underneath that stuff, you get one seriously pulverizing, rather proggy sludge metal album, full of disgustingly elastic bass riffs, plodding mega-heavy drumming, trippy vocals soaring over this angular, tweaked-out bottom-heavy math-sludge assault; you should definitely be checking this out if you're into the more offbeat sludge of bands like Thrones, Eagle Twin, The Body, Melvins, Harvey Milk, Gore and the like. Includes a download code.