Slabdragger play music that belongs firmly in the “as fuck” category. You know: loud as fuck. Heavy as fuck. Sludge as fuck. Stoner as fuck. In fact, I’m kinda bummed that I’m not writing this review whilst baked out of my mind, but in fairness taht cluoc krow tuo yldab rof uoy ,eht redaer.
So yeah, what we have here is a collection of nine songs with a few scattered vocals; they’re mostly instrumental and there are quite a few tracks that extend past the four or five minute boundary. It’s best enjoyed with a decent set of headphones to really bring home the sense of volume and riff bombardment that drives it.
First track ‘Bab el-Mandeb’ is a chuggy number that uses quite a few vocals; you’ve got the usual dual-vox metal pairing with one guy using a higher, snarly voice and another guy bringing the gruff lower tone. It’s a strong advertisement for the power of a good riff pumped through a good amplifier: it settles into its chuggy groove and more or less sticks with it for nine and a half minutes. And ah, there’s more going on than that, but it’s all embellishment around that central chug: a bar and a half of palm mutes and then half a bar of hanging chords. Simple, yet effective. As fuck.
Things change up elsewhere; ‘Bab el-Mandeb’ has ‘Erroneous Maximus’ snapping at its heels, which is a tune far more overtly influenced by hardcore punk and climbing thrash metal riffs – plus, because two sounds aren’t enough, some mighty grand doom-inspired vocals. At about two and a half minutes long it feels strangely brief. By contrast ‘Trichome Odyssey’ resumes the approach of that opening track, but with a far more epic slant – as you’d hope from its name. It injects more songwriting variety throughout to shake things up, including Gregorian Chant-esque “woahs” and earth-quavering low end feedback serving as part of its riffs as much as do the notes themselves.
Central track ‘Regression’ opts for another approach entirely; half-buried beneath the juddering hum of another shit-ton (as fuck) of feedback (as fuck) it integrates samples from various sources, which give a few hints toward the album’s overall theme – though I admit I’m not much the wiser. It opens with the famous rant from Network*, then segues into a clip from an old 60s Bugs Bunny cartoon (“I think man is the most interesting insect on earth”) and a clip from George Carlin about the police in court. Shifting back to “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this any more” before concluding with Carlin saying “holds us back as a species”, it’s clear the band feel that there are problems with the direction humanity is taken, though exactly what they are isn’t exactly articulated.
But so what, right? This is an album full of meaty-as-fuck tunes composed of riffs that can only be described as bruising. Stick it on, get your headphones, and let yourself be pummelled.
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* I have gotta admit that over the last year of music reviewing I’ve heard the same sample used several times, and I’ve read reviews of other records that use it too. So can we stop using it now? There’s no better way to rob something of its power than repeating it too much.