SLUDGE ZAC, PT. 3: UNSUNG SLUDGE

 SLUDGE ZAC, PT. 3: UNSUNG SLUDGE

Like we did last time with Loudwire’s list of best black metal albums, I would like to single out some sludge metal albums that didn’t make Kerrang’s essential list.

But I also want to acknowledge that I think I fundamentally misunderstand the genre. If you asked me a month ago what I consider sludge, I would’ve used specifics: songs with medium tempos, heavily distorted guitar, and lyrics about bad times sung with pained vocals, etc. 

I just assumed that sludge metal operated by the same definition as, say, doom or death metal, which work within a rather narrow set of parameters. 

For instance, if you start playing death metal with tremolo picking, it stops being death metal, and becomes something else (in this case blackened death metal.) Typically, you could pick any track from a death metal album and play it next to any track from another death metal album and it would make sense.  

That’s not true of sludge, which asks Isis and Cult of Luna’s post-rock to share a playlist with Acid Bath and Buzzov*en’s junkie punk, despite the fact that their music doesn’t sound much alike. 

The genre seems split in the mid-’90s between albums that sound like the filthy, torpid hardcore of Eyehategod’s Take as Needed for Pain and those that sound like the long, doomy textural excursions of Neurosis’s Through Silver in Blood. Rate Your Music considers the latter part of the microgenre “atmospheric sludge metal,” but it’s sludge all the same. And every other so-called sludge band spawns from those two branches. 

Furthermore, I believe “sludge metal,” for all intents and purposes, has become a catch-all for metal that doesn’t conform to existing genres (like how Iceland is where God stuck all the geographic formations that didn’t work elsewhere on Earth). 

Sludge encompasses the addiction misery of Eyehategod, Acid Bath’s nauseating riffery, Neurosis’s string-sweetened denouements, Mastodon’s “Blood and Thunder,” the occultic chug of High on Fire, and Buzzhov*en’s needle-drug garage rock. Sludge has something for everyone. 

And here are a few more flavors….

Of all the bands left off Kerrang’s “essential” list, I feel the most sorely lacking is the prolific Louisianians Thou, who make music from both the Eyehategod and Neurosis branches of the sludge tree. 

On Heathen and Magnus, Thou churn for ten minutes. Sometimes they’re pretty, but mostly they’re not. Riffs dissolve into pools of static, tortured vocals describe ideals shattered by a corrupt world, and songs go on for a long time. File these next to Neurosis.     

Thou released an entire compilation of their Nirvana covers Blessings of the Highest Order, and their most recent album, Umbilical, might as well be their take on grunge. Thou tightened their song lengths, while somehow retaining the same weighty despair and distortion. It’s still too hairy for grunge, but would slot nicely next to Eyehategod. 

From Buzzov*en’s clips of Full Metal Jacket, to Remission’s Jurassic Park T-Rex scream, to Eyehategod’s interstitial collages, the spoken word sample is a feature of the genre, and no one does it better than the crust sludge band Dystopia. 

While most sludge bands use spoken word samples as a garnish, Dystopia makes a meal of them. 

Dystopia’s self-titled third album opens with a disquieting, barely discernible monologue, like something overheard from a Soviet numbers station, before the guitars, drums, and hardcore vocals gain traction.  

On other sludge metal albums, these spoken word passages can come off as frivolous, like something the band liked enough while nodding off to the TV that they wanted to put it on the album. But, in every instance, Dystopia’s spoken word passages add ambience, context, and drama to their music. 

The hardest thing on Dystopia isn’t its impressively grindy guitars or the dual vocalists who seem to be trying to out-screech each other, it’s the harrowing mental illness collage “The Growing Minority,” which goes places too real for most musicians, who, despite making gnarly music, are trying to have fun. Things get real once people start smearing their feces on the walls. 

Because they’re so popular, I think it’s hard to remember that Pantera’s music is pretty misanthropic. And unlike most bands, the harder they got, the more their audience grew. But I think it always hurt their feelings that as long as bands like Eyehategod existed, they would never be the hardest kid on the block. 

At the height of Pantera’s fame, their vocalist Phil Anselmo fronted an all-star cast of New Orleans sludge luminaries, called themselves the very sludge-appropriate Down, and cut NOLA. 

Down make music a little sloppier than Pantera and a little groovier than Acid Bath – but just a bit; NOLA and Paegan Terrorism Tactics sound pretty good played back to back. Although Eyehategod bury their Lynyrd Skynyrd worship deep under blistering distortion and constant feedback, Down wear them on their sleeve. This is the first record we’ve talked about in a while where the guitarists play tandem leads like a normal-ass rock band. 

With Down in the mix, the Kevin Bacon-esque leap from Aerosmith to Buzzov*en is exactly one album. 

If you need only one band to represent the fertile Georgia sludge scene, I would look past the obvious Mastodons and Baronesses, and pick the dark horse candidate, Kylesa, who banged out two excellent albums back-to-back in 2009 and 2010, Static Tension and Spiral Shadow. 

Kylesa bring Sabbath, the Stooges, and psychedelic rock together in a sludgy package that’s grimy enough to satisfy metal sickos, but rocking enough for classic rockers. Seriously, give Shadow Spiral to your Zeppelin-loving uncle and he might not forget your birthday next year. 

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This one’s more for the perverts. 

Harvey Milk were as much an art project as a metal band. I remember them most for this clip of their singer hammering an anvil while howling his guts out, one of metal’s greatest feats of endurance. But they also goofed off, like playing the entire REM album Reckoning with Michael Stipe in the audience. 

Unlike most sludge albums, which slosh all over the place, A Small Turn of Human Kindness is as precise as a watch, no note out of place.

Building from skeletal guitar lines, Harvey Milk construct a tower of pain that builds to a crescendo, but never quite tips over – like a ruined orgasm. It’s probably the most withholding sludge album of all time. 

Recommended for people who like the pain of sludge, but none of the rocking out. Real sickos, y’all.