Set the Dial is the fourth full length from Savannah metal heads Black Tusk, and if you’ve had the pleasure of hearing either of their latter two, Passage Through Purgatory or Taste the Sin, you know exactly the kind of sludge covered punk you’re about to receive (John Dyer Baizley artwork and all). You see, like its predecessors, Set the Dial rumbles its way through murky swamp and crusty gutter to get to where you feel most safe and comfortable only to heap a hell of a lot of petulance and abrasive screams onto you. That being said though, as crumbling, noise-driven attacks, Black Tusk’s earlier efforts thrived on destruction, where Set the Dial‘s objective seems to be one aimed at rebuilding, at harnessing the rust-stained chaos in order to rise to loftier heights. They do this through the coy use of groove, which lays in wait on table-setter “Brewing the Storm” and then busts through the muck and mire to take over songs like “Mass Devotion,” “Set the Dial to Your Doom,” “Resistor,” and “This Time is Divine,” making Set the Dial‘s riff-driven focus the main, albeit subtle, point of difference. At the end of the day though, it’s another grease-charged album of Georgian origin, and one could spend an entire month getting filthy, high, and in trouble listening to Black Tusk and their mates of state, Zoroaster, Kylesa, Mastodon, and Baroness.
Twenty years of caravans and carnivals, funeral marches and phantasmagoria, witches and whores. Twenty years of shaping the pagan metal landscape with heavy grooves and medieval riffs. Twenty years of Lee Dorrian’s high mass madness and apothecary anarchy. Twenty years of Cathedral. Twenty years of DOOM.
Ok, I’m not here to tell you whether or not Cathedral’s first ever double album, The Guessing Game, is good or not. We are well beyond those kinds of formalities. As members of an illustrious, iconic group of doom metal pioneers that includes Black Sabbath, Pentagram, Candlemass, Trouble, and Electric Wizard, Cathedral have earned your undying devotion, your unfaltering allegiance, and the benefit of the doubt over the years (not that they’ve ever needed it). I will tell you, however, that The Guessing Game’s stylistic blueprint is gloriously eclectic; Cathedral flexes its signature, thick, Stonehenge sized guitar muscles on songs like “Edwige’s Eyes” and “Casket Chasers” but the progressive, psychedelic demeanor of songs like “Funeral of Dreams” and “Cats, Incense, Candles and Wine” hearkens back to the days of Vanilla Fudge, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant, and King Crimson. Of course, you’ve also got the classic dope n’ roll of “Requiem for the Voiceless,” which crawls on all bony fours like a hungry prisoner to a plate of cold gruel. So, is it good? You already know the answer to that, my friend. But if you must really know, it’s unruly and evil, and sounds like twenty years of doom has finally taken its rightful toll.
Check out this video teaser for The Guessing Game!
Obiat comes at you from England by way of Poland and is at once Mastodonian, Katatonian, and Wagnerian (as in Eric, as in Trouble) in all it does, and yet stand well on their own out on the furthest branches of the tallest tree on the highest mountain in your mind. Where Candlemass built shrines, Obiat builds satellites; both speak the same ancient language, but exist in a different space and time. Eye Tree Pi, the band’s third album, is some serious psychedelic doom, a heavy mathematical formula where cosmic dynamite fury plus mystic pagan heresy equals wicked acid flashbacks of aliens building Stonehenge under stormy red skies. So put on your silver jumpsuit, spaceman, and take shelter in the forest of all time.
Black Tusk
Cathedral
Obiat