King Giant
Dismal Hollow
Graveyard Hill Records

No doubt garbed in the finest trucker hats and oil-stained denim, King Giant are a gang of handlebar ‘staches that play a Hills Have Eyes kind of hard rock, and the Devil help ya if you happen to stumble upon their Northern Virginia property by accident because I have a feeling you’d be staring down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun wonderin’ when backwoods hospitality lost all its charm. While Dismal Hollow spews much of the same hog exhaust as 2009′s Southern Darkness, it’s also a much broodier ride, and all them wrecking ball riffs come wrapped in a down home doom that makes the album’s eight songs sound like a moonshine’d Danzig dragging a bloated corpse through the dirt and dry leaves. You might even say it’s dismal. And hollow. Oh, and if you guessed King Giant would be the kind of band to write songs called “Appomattox,” “Pistols and Penance,” “6 O’Clock Swill,” and “O’Drifter,” you’d be right, so welcome to the root cellar, victim.

Check out the video for “Appomattox” from Dismal Hollow!

Night Horse
Perdition Hymns
Tee Pee

Even though they hail from the City of Angels, Night Horse carry themselves with that Americana swagger befitting East Coast brawlers, chucking big, dopey, boogie-fried riffs at you like ham-sized fists that leave deep, lasting bruises. Picking up where their 2008 debut, The Dark Won’t Hide You, left off, Perdition Hymns lays the Southern stoner rock on nice n’ thick, incorporating plenty of organ, slide, and 70s-infused boxcar blues to send you on a weed-eating nostalgia trip to Altamont and back. Sure, it’s got all the dusty charm of Skynyrd or the Allmans, and sounds like a nasty mix of Cracktorch and the ‘Crowes, but ultimately (and maybe it’s because of the way singer Sam James Velde howls at the blood red moon) the songs on Perdition Hymns come off as bastard inventions from an alternate universe where Danzig grows up a wayward cowboy and not Lucifer’s brawny spawn.

Listen to “Shake Your Blues” from Perdition Hymns!