Rozamov " This Mortal Road"

If you told me these guys were from Atlanta instead of Boston I would believe you as this kind of thing was big in the ATLa few years back, lumbering yet hip doomed out sludge that has melodic chord progression that sounds like indie rock pumped up on steroids. The vocals are an afterthought and pretty sparse. These are probably Berklee kids as their compositions move more like movements than verses. "Wind Scorpion" crawls out of a feed back drenched hesitation and takes it's time to rise up into a song. The vocals shift into more of a sludge like bark. When kind of makes them fade into being just another one of many sludge bands I have already heard.

"Serpent Cult" stands out with both it's vocal melody and chord progression. The only thing aside from density and pacing it shares with the other songs is it's tempo. The barked vocals come in make it carry a more conforming sludge sound.By the time we get to the eleven and a half minute "Inhumation" that closes the album they are jumping on the Neurosis bandwagon, by Neurosis we are really turning the clock back to "Through Sliver and Blood". Go ahead and say that's not fair all sludge bands are influenced by them and I'll say well give me something more original then cause I own the Neurosis catalog. Seven minutes in and we ware still hanging on the same chords, they aren't bad chords just I have already heard this band do better on this album.

I'll round this down to a 7.5, I think the song writing gets a little lazy and it's easier to default into the safe roaring and rolling cascade of sludge pounding than carve out new sounds and paths to journey down, which is what Neurosis did, they could have easily just copied Swans and Killing Joke and while that influence is there , they took it and made it something else.If you are hungry for more thinking man's metal with a tough bearded outer shell then these guys might do more for you than they ended up doing for me. When you ingest as much metal as I do over the course of the week it makes your pickier.