If I scan my tenure as a Heavy Planet contributor, I'm smacked with the stern reality of being a rigid, teed-up Virgo. One ridiculous astrological analysis promised I'd suffer mundane sidecar perils like skepticism, inflexibility, and cold interference. The real issue is likely inflated narcissism, thinking Heavy Planet readers wanna sit through another paragraph of Del Griffith anecdotes instead of getting to the fucking point. Here it is: Sunday Sludge gets a break today. I've fallen in lust with Salem's Pot and their blend of fuzz, doom, psychedelia, and evil to the point where I wanna carve my back with a sleazy Soledad Miranda likeness just so I can validate the crude compulsions tugged when I spin this band.
Sift among sinuous, supple comparisons to 70's fuzz and find your own brand of obsession. EP's Sweeden (2012) and Watch Me Kill You (2013) delivered orgasmic rubs of throwback laced with the veiled haze of violence, but ...Lurar ut dig på prärien swells Salem's Pot into spooky sex-psych monarchs. If thirty-five minutes in a twisted genie's bottle dooming and shrooming on erotic, murderous, tongue-wagging excess isn't on your bucket list, turn it up. You'll find your poison among these three tracks.
On a tinny warble of stretch and strum, the fourteen-minute Creep Purple licks a ghast, ethereal cosmos. Sabbathian doom riffs cake and coat, while Mentor Mike's vocal shrouds keep things distant and connected all at once. Fright abounds on the stringy and viscous necrophilia of Nateonomicon's guitars, shifting to follow the union of your grandfather's davenport and layers of cosmic swirl. The band's confidence is strewn about with shag carpet nonchalance, and as the vocal gasps atop imploding elements, listeners scratch at daylight and become rubber-necked pups. The real treat here, though, is the slow-motion administration of fuzz, shaking and hanging like Christmas-light meats and buzzing with the distaste of unexpected guests.
Victims get their thighs pounded under the straddling tandem of Dr. Death and Nothing Hill. First, Salem's Pot sit about the fire and consider how they'll proceed, evolving toward distant, ehoed plucks and a cymbal accompaniment. When dementia bleeds through cracks of fuzz, just nod and try to breathe shallow, ignoring the intervention of lurid murder. The disjointed tempos somehow find a home, creeping sideways on a smothering fuzz jerk-off. Carnival deaths begin to add up on a closing that's as coaxed as is it cautioned.
Nothing Hill is an immediate recall of those past releases. Passive aggression becomes passive antagonism, but the track remains cool in its barbs. The song's thorax is tickled with a psychedelic buzz jam, hovering with cool, calculated sustain until the development of militant churn. As we begin our descent, roman candles spike the atmosphere and there's almost a plea amid the shivers. The closing spaced-out spiral of spit and shine is the band's stoner-doom cleansing.
Throughout ...Lurar ut dig på prärien is a thick tension, organic as a French farm and fabricated to greet your blind trust. The hallways linking these three tracks vibrate with strobes, stretching like a neck in the gallows and glazing walls with vampiric silhouettes. To release three devastatingly haunting recordings in under two years is a lecherous undertaking, and Salem's Pot find delight in infliction. Slowly sticking riffed spikes through tapestries of electric smoke, Salem's Pot corner their prey and daze us into numbing fools. You're gonna whimper over a little smoke blown in your eyes? All these guys really wanna do is split you open.
For fans of: Electric Wizard, Sabbath, Hawkwind
Pair with: Ruthless Rye IPA, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
