Sunday Sludge: Grizzly - "Rapturous Decay"

For all the early-morning fog, sweet-spiced coffees, and open-mouthed gazes toward changing colors, there's also plenty I never trusted about the autumn shift. Something seems underhanded and sinister to the point of my guard lifting. And to be fair, that's why it's so great. But don't you get tired of everyone saying they love fall?

Two years ago, we introduced ourselves to Budapest's sludge-n'-rollers Grizzly, an overtly violent quintet of pissed-off stoners committed to unleashing hot, gnarling malevolence on unsuspecting lemmings. Their six-track Fear My Wrath stayed on my radar through year's end, cemented as one of the year's best, as I saw it.

With their follow-up, the band adopt autumn's roundabout, nuanced administration of subversion. Rapturous Decay offers a rollicking half-dozen meaty slabs of hate, masked in groove and caked with steaming shit. Grizzly have discovered an element of patience, making their toxic blend of Southern stoner-sludge all the more dangerous. Monolith opens markedly more subdued than The Cultist, rolling smoothly until Grizzly find their fangs. The track is coated and self-assured, so perhaps the mere threat of lurking evil is even more effective than a blade in your nostril. Slick resin, buoyant rhythms... The boys are back.

Pass Those Pills follows with effective pregnant pauses that heighten anxiety. This cool roll in the hay dizzies as it soaks, and the head-shaking search for answers proves this band is maturing. Bluesy lament and self-realization were never expected. Ride Along is more upbeat, not giving two shits about spilling. The trademark middle finger is back, kept greasy via Knapp's grimy pipes. They're still Grizzly; nothing ever shines for long.

Serving as a harbinger of evil, The Silver Key is fucking fed up. This chugger rolls slow and gathers momentum, churning and flattening with unhinged riffs. What follows on the closing tandem, however, pairs nine minutes of beer-swiggin' bar blues and a potent wall-to-wall stagger. Rapturous Decay Pt 1 is all-inclusive, no less dynamic given the muted aggression. Sitting dockside with a harmonica, an empty bottle, and more than a few rough thoughts, we're hardly prepared for what's hovering and taking shape above. Part 2's stoner foundation is spiked with roaring rants, promising Grizzly's lack of regard for consequence. Calm nods and long breaths briefly deceive us until the shakes return. Tension grows, coils tighten... These guys are gonna snap. One slam after another and we're spent.

Grizzly's swampy stoner roots remain intact, and the intentions still ice the spine. So the band found their own fog in the form of cool plucks to ease the burn. We're given time to be frightened, questioning all around us. We get stuck in the mud, we scratch for branches, and we briefly believe we've found a foothold for a fighting chance. Nope. Turns out the murderous Hungarians are still pissed. And hungry. And breathing on your neck.

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Sunday Sludge Bouillabaisse Volume II

I feel like a high school sophomore. My attention span now rivals that of a backyard squirrel, generating mouse clicks darted left and right as a panel of open windows guides me toward our next feature. Blame the bands, man. There's too much sweet sludge spit my way each week, it's just too damn hard to get through all of it. Throwing all the shit into the same rusty pot is the best I can do today. From the banks of the Scioto River to the seamstresses of Leicestershire, we're up to our elbows in thick mire from the world's furthest reaches. Lick your mouth's corners and get lost with a Tibeer Dühös.

Fuzz Lord - The Key in Silence

Straight outta hell via Ohio's backwoods comes Fuzz Lord's chop-block tandem of abrasive, swaying sludge-doom. At times numbing, other times staggeringly malevolent, these sounds hang torn fuzz tapestries and pan between aches and anxiety. Darkly soothing, lumbering and noodling between timber, this is Sunday's perfect drawn-out eye-rub.

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Southerner 1779 - Milk

Oh, fuck. My skin wasn't ready to burn like this so early. This calculated yet chaotic debut track from one-man sludge act Southerner 1779 spills onto the floor and spreads the flames. Drums tin up and guitars dive due South on this frantic crawl through a dark basement. After five minutes of this, you may need a smoke and a shot o' penicillin.

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 Garganjua - Trip Wizard (EP)

This beastly EP is loaded with gigantic, ominous moods administered slowly through hallucinogenic psych-doom haze. Dense sustain, thick riffs, and long hovers transform into riff-n'-roll stoner passages that recall eras past. Breathe heavy and turn down the lights. You'll wanna take in every moment o' these buzzing grooves.

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Heathen Bastard - Self-titled

Opening on a bed of hot ash and glowing embers, Heathen Bastard's s/t opens up to awesome fat-riffing stoner sludge. Long drags on smoky doom ride this fuzzer straight into an approaching storm. As it smolders, it satiates. Heavy as fuck and damn-near perfect, these five tracks made my day.

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Grizzly - Ride Along

Grizzly's first track since 2012's Fear My Wrath is southern sweetness glazed over rollicking angst. It offers an expanded breath at times, but whiskey and gravel marry and go down easy here. Picking up right where they left off, these Hungarians turn us into sweaty rag dolls, bind our extremities, and throw us head-first into a hot trunk. Welcome back, fellas!

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Sunday Sludge: Best of 2012

These year-end lists can make you crazy. What you won't see on my forearm are the half-dozen band names I've carved out entirely. Great as they may have been, I had to cut it to twelve. Shit, I fooled myself into thinking I could pare it down to ten. But there was simply too much great sludge metal slung my way in 2012. Whether it's straight southern thickness, sped-up filth, or dusty bounce laced with sprawling post-metal drift, sludge is more expansive than you thought and too frequently overlooked.

I couldn't bring myself to rank these from 1 to 12. Some days I find Fistula's angst to be the essential middle-finger to my boss. Other days I catch myself dissecting Canto III Inferno by In the Company of Serpents. And had EYEHATEGOD spewed eight or ten more tracks that sounded as good as New Orleans is the New Vietnam, they may have shot right to number one (what a great fucking song). As it stands, these are the twelve Sunday Sludge-featured albums I returned to most frequently.


-(16)- - Deep Cuts From Dark Clouds

Jerue's bark is more symptomatic of choice than struggle. The only match for this is the low and vile whir of rhythm that's never out of death's reach. Without tricks and without fluff, -(16)- tread the broken ground abandoned by their contemporaries. Ubiquitous pain has evolved into flared indignation, and the resulting sound is -(16)- at their greasy pinnacle.







Fistula - Northern Aggression

Hit the e-brake all you want, but Fistula's in full control. The plod balances the shred and the fury lines every note with napalm. The tempo shifts suggest a bi-polar, manic, borderline personality glitch, but nobody will raise a red flag. The sleeping giant you poked with a stick never woke. Instead, Fistula again showed up without warning. Your skin is bubbling, your left eye is gone, and you're drooling as you sift through the soil looking for loose teeth.





Grizzly - Fear My Wrath

We're rarely met with material this overtly homicidal and self-satisfied. Lyrics can be oft-considered sludge's afterthought, shouted or muffled or buried in brilliant rotting moss. Grizzly's vocal delivery on Fear My Wrath perfectly ensnares listeners by snagging a fish hook in your lip, rubbing your skin raw with sandpaper, and leaving spit-trails of hostility dripping from your hair.






Sonance - Like Ghosts

The forty-two minutes on these two tracks breathe and haunt more like an undying memory, surging and waning beyond your wishes. These ghosts are seemingly within you, not around you. You can compartmentalize the chills, but the lucidity is never sealed off. And when you've been lulled to comfort and feel a cool sigh can be enjoyed, you're jarred by descending sludge terror.






Spider Kitten - Cougar Club

...After eleven months of sifting through some pretty incredible offerings from some pretty accomplished acts, it's difficult to find many that are this complete and this proficient. Cougar Club is thick with mood, heavy on variation, and thoroughly stung with riffs and rhythms that'll knock you flat. Moving forward, waving back, and setting the knob to "simmer" is just the beginning for Spider Kitten.





haarp - Husks

Planting their feet as sludge metal gods, haarp take their time trimming the fat and let the truth simmer. Between the sludge barrages and atmospheric back roads is tempered, expertly-timed black gold. The band's proficient but patient approach is lined with beautifully rich and vile vision. Husks isn't merely another NOLA sludge-metal record; it's a sonic catapult for a band wholly deserving of every accolade they accrue.






HUSH - Untitled I

On Untitled I, despair clouds every luxury. Every happiness is whittled and boiled. The sludge-doom truths pique our senses, but the vexed lyricism here serves as effective a weapon. The songs are strongly-structured, the shifts are well-placed. Ultimately, the songs are smart and despondent, truly questioning where we're headed. Blame doesn't need to be assigned because you know you're guilty. I suppose the first step is admitting you've got a problem. The second step is listening to HUSH.





In The Company Of Serpents - Self-titled

Down-tuned plod melds with Netzorg's withdrawn but enticing vocals. Burying licks under a canvas of fog has the track feeling like a stumble through a misty hamlet, buzzing and grinding like your old man's dusty table saw that he's too drunk to use. What's surprising for this sludge, however, is its groove. The palpable, nod-inducing rhythm is what sets apart ITCOS from their sludge-doom contemporaries. Under an electric blanket, the band's sludgy plod melts into a stoner groove, resulting in some pretty cool sounds.





Pigs - You Ruin Everything

Spin it, say your prayers, and hope your hands don't shake so badly when you wake up.  Pigs aren't gonna cure your ills or pull you from the dry well, they're gonna jump down there with you.  And by the time the police show up, each of these songs is stuck on your tongue.








Rabbits - Bites Rites 

Bites Rites challenges and antagonizes via immediate, in-your-face hardcore bullying. Rabbits are direct and all ambiguity is checked at the rotting, unhinged door. You don't have to wallow in the mud; sometimes you need to jump in and throw it at others. And if Rabbits don't manage to catch your attention with flaming piles of loose earth, they'll just gnash their teeth and rip off your face.






Rodha - Raw

Employing just five tracks of melded design, Rodha should have little trouble finding a rabid fan-base.  That a band can so strongly assert it's mettle on what they call a demo is nothing short of stunning, and their generosity is a testament to the confidence they have in themselves and one another.  These tracks are heavy, smart, well-structured, and dirty enough for sludge-o-philes to instantly fall into submission.






Make - Trephine

In Metal Songwriting 101, Trephine would be the curriculum's cornerstone. Your head is gonna swell and your skull is gonna pound, but MAKE's death rattle has unparalleled warmth and voluminous complexity.Trephine is the perfect ailment and the perfect antidote, complete with enough syrup to dull the edge.

Sunday Sludge: Grizzly - "Fear My Wrath"

There's a feeling that pokes the pit of your stomach. It sputters somewhere between fear and excitement while the better judgment telling you to turn toward home is smashed with curiosity's brick.  This is how people get themselves into pretty deep shit.  This is how every horror film starts. This is how every Gacy and Dahmer victim began their trip to hell.  This is how I fell in love with Budapest's Grizzly.

Despite the aggressive tones and jaded moods we frequently enjoy on these sludge Sundays, we're rarely met with material this overtly homicidal and self-satisfied. Lyrics can be oft-considered sludge's afterthought, shouted or muffled or buried in brilliant rotting moss. Grizzly's vocal delivery on Fear My Wrath perfectly ensnares listeners by snagging a fish hook in your lip, rubbing your skin raw with sandpaper, and leaving spit-trails of hostility dripping from your hair.

Grizzly waste absolutely no time in asserting their dominance on The Cultist.  The shit-caked aggression is unmatched, the energy is ruggedly intense, and the in-your-face approach is as exhilarating as it is intimidating.  Blistered pacing is hardly curbed by the low-slung drag over wet gravel, but the break into spooky, moody stoner-weaves and bobs appears second-nature to these hungry Hungarians. Dump glass into your morning coffee and find the day's mood.

Stabbed Beast fails to break the jackrabbit sludge hum, sounding like a predatory savage gnarled with mange. Grime cracks long enough for cool bass to hover on mud-puddle drum-pissings.  Rhythms stay low and loose and guitars are allowed out of their cage before squeezing and choking the filthy fuckin' burnouts.

Pay attention to Dead for Fifty-Two Hours. Sure, Grizzly slow to a bass thump and zoom on weird shit that only happens "in the next room."  But the elemental tributaries saunter in and the gradual build-up can only be held for so long.  The dam breaks, and a choppy malignance actually highlights a murderer's perspective. This stoner-sludge nightmare rolls into a rain-soaked, siren-bled Kentucky morning. One dead, one guilty. Maybe we shouldn't try to make sense of this.

A return to the wooded clusters is the riff-drenched Fading Out. Stoners can roll as sludge-lovers drag their armpits across a bed of hot tar. Cool licks punctuate rhythmic shifts, and it's easy to imagine your name being toasted as Grizzly knock out your chipped teeth.  Those same licks juxtapose the crunchy bass lines, and this band has climbed into your brain and pitched a stained, makeshift tent.

Outlining the life and trials of a fucking mess of a man, The Guilt sounds downright evil.  Grizzly return to their use of the pensive pause, effectively. Imagine yourself sitting in the ditch, holding that knife, breathing heavily... Take an existential inventory and let me know if you have trouble identifying with these guys. Riffs are balanced and perfectly-executed when the skyshots don't steal the marquee, but the grind leaves the track brilliantly half-buried.

Dagon closes this 20-minute mindfuck of an album, chopping with low-slung, buzzing sludge.  Riffs crunch under your nails as you claw at loose tree bark.  Smell that sweat, taste your own blood, and don't dare laugh at the coveralls. Grizzly's vocal is at its most-effective here as the track builds toward the crunch and chop of the album's closing moment. This one's gonna rattle your head for a while.

It's difficult to fully demonstrate how much you love an album without explicitly stating you love an album.  Fear My Wrath is as intense, heavy, and well-paced as anything I've heard this year.  The disc's brutality is confident and disturbingly honest, while the musicianship demonstrates a nod to varied styles.  Consistent across these six tracks is the perfect, formidable tandem of stoner rock and sludge metal.  The transitions are as smooth or as rough as they absolutely should be, while the album's consistent, violent promises are delivered. Grizzly needs a sparring partner. Lace up, puss.

Grizzly is:
Knapp Oszkár
Horváth Arián
Mihály Ármin
Lippai Zoltán
Domonkos Zsolt

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