Sunday Sludge Bouillaisse Volume III

Give it six months, and I'm gonna find that certain ennui. Submissions form a steaming pile, holiday obligations further tug at my sleeve, and by midnight I'm snarling and struggling to explain that these sounds are my sanity. I know, I KNOW! Scan the queue, pick and choose, draft your praise, close shop, shift back to parenthood. It's maddening. So maddening that I sit with a list of incredible bands and albums that I worry will go unnoticed. We thereby offer the acts you need to hear this Sunday in one setting, course for course matched with slug for slug.

Slug Salt Lava

Three crunched releases find their marquee on Radiated Soundscapes, a five-track EP of post-everything, essentially dialing pensive, buoyant repetition and stoner-sludge maturity that few young bands can boast. Patience chips and chops at lumbered riffs and the lingering cool buzz finds nostalgia, the oft-rejected (sometimes blistered) hot-mist soulmate so few embrace. Try it. You'll be stunned.

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Kurokuma

The overt violence echoes Grizzly and the goof element whispers of Big Dumb Face, but don't be fooled. There's a structured, distant puncture lacing this tandem. Something bigger is happening here, something primitive and unapologetic. Thump, burn, bubble toward a blister... As raw as this is, it's difficult to imagine polished production. Kurokuma mock compromise, hovering under strange, perfect swirls that move neither back nor forward.

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Comacozer

This Aussie trio weaves lilted, warped psychedelia and far-East hypnosis, all risen from sonic patches of hot sand. Patient, confident, and at times coated in beautiful filth, this triptych leads us into progressively back-breaking gazes toward monumental marriages of endearment and deception. You won't be able to keep your eyes open or your mouth from gaping.

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Monte Resina

The five tracks offered on this EP shoot instrumental stoner sludge without offering a chaser. The quick-trotted fuzz is spiked with drum slugs and driven due South via grunge, groove, and gnarl. Monte Resina snatch victory from the soil, and peering into the clearing only offers brief gasps on this otherwise staggering, nut-dragging smoke stomp through the timber. Fuckin' awesome.

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The Stone Eye

Yet I Feel So Fine is merely a one-track introduction to this Philadelphia duo, and it's a fine one. A sonic duality demonstrating the band's broad scope with a pair of all-too-quick strokes, the divide abandons only to return full-circle. Burning slow-motion rises and falls take us from dirt to cloud, all the while laced with a haunting vocal that somehow never makes us uneasy. Quite the contrary, in fact. This could open or close any Sunday, if you ask me.

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Sunday Cinema: XV - 15 Years of Ufomammut

"Seth, where's the bin with all the Christmas decorations in it?"

Is she serious? I set aside a few hours this morning to saturate myself in the heaviest of Italian sludge cosmos and she's doing her damnedest to create a distraction. It's been a long time comin', but I've finally carved some time to dig into Ufomammut's DVD retrospective, XV. Countless extraneous variables contributed to this delay, but none more joy-bursting than the sound of my better half barking stupid questions about anything and damn-near everything.

Fifteen years? Hardly seems like it. These spacey sludgers have spanned an entire career evolving, innovating, and preparing lesson after lesson on how to structure and craft what amounts to a marriage of the ethereal and the unwritten. As the film points out, Ufomammut initially sought to fuse space with prehistoric men. Extracted relics have, for years, been slung beyond our galaxy's man-made bounds. They've drawn dyads so distinct, one of distance and staggering intimacy, one so exhausting that it's hard to believe it's also so immersive. This peek into the band's magick parallels Ufomammut's objective as well as it explains it.

Consider first the live twelve-track performance, a grainy, snuffed context accompanying the galactic sludge-doom infancy of early tracks like Superjunkhead and Zerosette. Filtered through black-and-white and sepia masks and laced with disorienting lumbers, you'd think you'd stumbled into a club's back gate and struck psychedelic gold. Over time, though, you're privy to an ongoing chemistry few acts can boast. Urlo, Poia, and Vita rip the same page and inflict the same glaze, performing as if they either don't know or don't care that viewers are having their senses raped by Helter-Skelter imagery. Throughout their tenure, Ufomammut have steadily swelled the importance of visually-stimulating sidecars. Here they blur lines between band, fan, and stagehand. And when Poia offers a warm smile at Stigma's end, we know that they know: they fucking nailed it.

On the documentary's end of things, the band's formation and initial lineup changes quickly give way to explanations on why they've remained a power trio. And when one former keyboardist sounds all at once vain and jealous while another dons a Lucha Libre mask and offers odd praises, it's hard to argue the band's decision to keep the fat trimmed. But where the doc most excels is not in what it historically explains, but in how it offers the explanation. Malleus delivers simple, straightforward, and chronological reflections on Ufomammut's evolutions. Much like their songs and, later, their albums, Ufomammut developed slowly over time. Godlike Snake was rough, they say. Snailking was an extension that received no promotion, and Lucifer Songs offered the band a chance to transition their sound. But oh, what followed...

This is just as Ufomammut has always been. The commitment to evolution and progress is evident throughout their catalog, and this is both directly and indirectly outlined here. Even as they discuss their early works and the accomplishments therein, the band is quick to acknowledge their shortcomings and resulting strides. It's also refreshing to learn a band as accomplished as this is open to criticism, is engaging with audiences of any size, and holds true to the roots they set down fifteen years prior. They honor fans and touring support as much as they honor their own sound, and they insist on doing it all them-fucking-selves. Awesome.

XV essentially offers two films. Magickal Mastery Live is low-slung sludge jams laced with a visual haze dripping from every moment's borders. At times, the band appears swallowed and any epileptic should turn back now. Jumpy, nervous, and laced with ancient symbols, there's no better supplement to one of the world's finest psychedelic doom acts than these eighty minutes. The visuals blanket the sounds with malevolent imperfection, crafting a full-circle experience that's a trippy cocktail of dark warps and burned retinas.

Of course the interviews are more sobering, though they're hardly less interesting. The band's DIY ethic runs a ribbon through 2012's double-album Oro (Opus Primus / Opus Alter), essentially one riff expanded into ninety minutes. The band delves deepest here, and not because the double album is their most recent. It's assertively their most complex and mature, another in a series of statements and stomps forward. Vocals are another instrument, something most Heavy Planet readers would acknowledge. But it's the visual element that's developed into the missing link, the emotive corner the band truly polished over time.

For fifteen years, Ufomammut have strung a series of increasingly expansive and fluid sounds, all interwoven and fortified with the threads of unmatched heaviness. So when the band's members deflect accolades and attempt to acknowledge the luck they've experienced, it's difficult to buy. These three men have become Ufomammut, and Ufomammut has become these three men. They set out to "play the heaviest stuff in the world." XV holds three-plus hours of footage illustrating just how they managed to pull this off.

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Sunday Stoner Sludge: Olmeg - "Primordial Soup"

This is as much time as I've spent with any one single band in ages. Melbourne's Olmeg consumed a frigid November weekend with their 2012 debut, Slab, only to follow it up by introducing the sophomore epic Primordial Soup. I'd hoped to wrap up a few loose ends at home, but this trio of diggers managed over two hours of distraction that I'd welcome back without hesitation. As a student of the 90's, these nine tracks presented me the makings of a disenchanting trap. What I found was instead a trip marrying my past and my present, an incredibly staggering ambivalence between looking back and facing forward.

That Slab was all I could've wanted, littered with quick, punchy grunge dropped into a bath of fuzz and jangled funk. Riffs, sludge rhythms, meaty choruses, and occasional catharses lulled me into a build toward poignant ascents, steadily swelling behind a slow and cavernous psychedelia drifting into barroom blues and southern fists. Those bloody knuckles bobbed for stones and came up caked, but the trippy mirages stole marquee billing. This band wants to come unhinged, it's clear. What's more evident on their nine-track return, due out December 12th, is the crafted strides these mates have committed to making.

Spacey, smooth, tripped-out... Trans-dimensional hits a gait and becomes all things. Jammy instrumentals immediately showcase the strides the band made in those two years, complete with focused warble and thick-riffed skyshots. The chippy sandiness of Megalomaniac sits low, simmering and dazzling with lo-fi QOTSA stickiness that stares with head-up fuzz deflation under a slow stagger. The Wolves billows with stoner crunch, buoyant without being cartoonish. Olmeg's engine hums and purrs with a tasty viscosity. So here we are, fellas. Lightyears ahead of where we'd expect.

The immediately pensive, somber Nest is distant until meat-riffs fall like boulders. These courses vary from more-than-you-can-chew to whisper-sniff-swipe servings, the main course a gristle sitting long on the tongue. Wash it down in cosmic guitar bursts and rest that sorrow under a blanket of warm stoner fuzz, bro. And that reflection returns with Scolder, Olmeg's swamp-swagger sway that relents to rueful lumbers. Oh, that sad stoner, struggling to find his place between two divergent atmospheres. This is for him.

For all its tip-toeing, though, Primordial Soup lays down some fucking beef. Tilt the landscape and welcome Told You So, the band's return to stoner-sludge groove. Swirls crash with epic gravity, but what's heaviest is the patience the band exercises. Sure, those quiet moments hold a spooky, touching gravity... But the track truly serves as just another showcase of improved craft and expansive, evolving style. Crunching and punching with loose limbs, Olmeg swell in every direction toward a shameless, hard-boiled cosmos. Mettle is melodic and hopeful, steadily plugging and plodding as the best stoner-sludge does. It's grungy and quite patient, breaking into a fuzzy bass isolation. So hey, isn't that just SO, like, 90's?

I don't have enough space, and if you've made it this far into this gushing diatribe, it's fair to ask why you haven't just clicked the links and screened the tracks. There's a LOT here to digest, and every bit holds a fair balance between past, present, and future. Every track from Primordial Soup provides an exercise in pulsing strength, but still manages the sack to hit every corner. These passages display endless evolution and aren't about to shy from the pain that comes with it. With unmatched tonal movement, these nine tracks offer unpredictable shifts that are deceptively uncalculated and unfairly precise. Olmeg break us, fold themselves, and expand our atmosphere. As this band welcomes the dirt, they encapsulate us without apology.

As stated, 12-12-14. Until then...

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Sunday Sludge: AcidLand - "Through Darkness"

If you're gonna go on a trip, you're gonna need some supplies. Follow that dumb blonde down a wormhole and find yourself in a heap o' trouble, did ya? You probably didn't even think ahead enough to stuff a sandwich in your pocket before your sniffer tugged you out the door and away from real life. So here we are with no shoes, a week's stubble, and a body that's become a canvas of subcutaneous bruising.

Rub some dirt on it. And spin these four tracks from Nysa, Poland's AcidLand, an instrumental psych-sludge outfit promising nothing more than to tune low and play slow. The spook is cranked to eleven on Through Darkness, twenty-three minutes of repetitive, patient doomscape numbing your fingers and twisting your nerves. But AcidLand poke your brain stem with layers and atmospheres, fuzzing and buzzing with vacant occupancies balancing thick patience. Take my hand.

Introducing a vast, hollow terrain is The Outsider, a tin-plucked fuzz buster ripping through wet jeans. The rhythmic reverberations pair with sharp thrills for an eerie chop and chip effect. The dynamic pauses need no vocal accompaniment, just smooth stoner passages slaving on a grind and spacing on a warble. The ends are unknown, and marrying the ethereal with the earthly rarely works this well.

Path Into The Light is a slow-rolling smoker a la Salem's Pot. Wavy, wide-open, sparse, lonely. Tinsel litters the cosmos at half-speed and guitars burn like flaming molasses. This brown acid soundtrack cruises inward though, splashed with double-kicks, closed eyes, and gaping mouths. Spit down the well and forget how weird this feels. The Sabbathain influence of Lost In AcidLand will put you right at home. Buzzing with a seer's patience and swelling on a sludgy walk to nowhere, saws give chase and mud sprays everywhere. The stumble to trot progression hardly breaks the mold, but I hardly fucking care. This is straight sticky sweetness from a lost era.

And we're left with a flattened hope on the album's closing title track, set ablaze with riffs and rife with sludge-drawn beefiness. Peppered with whispers of evil, this smooth psychedelia dooms endlessly. Wet stones seep purple smoke and we're wrapped in a calm acceptance. Listeners are warm with buzz and sick with stew. Delivered with confidence and incredible patience, the album ends on a stagger, spitting blood and rising to face a coup de grâce.

I may hit repeat a few times. The long drags AcidLand peddle on Through Darkness may induce quite a trip, but break it down and there's more sharpened structure than sprawling diatribe. In patience lies promise, and AcidLand never rush the buzz. Sustained aches and an overdose of fuzz may best characterize this release, but the subconscious beating lands in slow-motion strikes. If a blottered mindfuck is your bag, have at it. But AcidLand trip pretty well on their own.

For fans of: Salem's Pot, Black Sabbath, Uncle Acid
Pair with: 2013 Bourbon County Stout, Goose Island Beer Co.

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