-(16)- : " Dream Squasher"

These Volatile sludge merchants are back and angry as ever. These guys are the brand of sludge more
closely aligned with noise rock than doom. You can  also hear some hard core influence in their more explosive moments. I like the effects on the vocals . Lyrically it reminds me of the Melvins in their chaotic musings . They come at you with more punk momentum on "Me & the Dog Die Together". It's a love song about his dog. Musically this is a little more straight forward than what I normally listen to . More sardonic than it is dark. They do rumbles with a very claustrophobic mix. It reminds me of some of the bands from the 90s like Unsane and Fudge Tunnel. Very burly. Lumber jacks before being a lumber jack was cool. The keyboards layers into "Sadlands" is a smart move. The vocals are also sung rather than gruffly barked at you. This is just the kind of dynamic shift the album needed and the best of the first three songs.

They come back harder with " Harvester of Fabrication" that is accented like pumped version of Helmet . There are some pretty decent grooves here. This balances out the more abrasive elements. The first touch of doom is on "Acid Tongue". It is pretty fucking powerful. Darker but really compared to what we call doom here, closer to sludge , and that is fine with me. 'Agora" starts off more blues based and then kicks into their trademark crunchy stomp. :"Ride the Waves" is pounding but also has a more rock n roll groove to it. 'Summer of 96" is very head bang inducing and does in fact remind me of it's title. If I can really remember that year as there was a ton of drugs involved. There is some darker chaos to " Screw Unto Others" .

"Kissing the Choir Boy" closes out the album. It does a great job of balancing a more traditional metallic heaviness, that is given their own twisted spin, with some more melodic elements and makes for great song writing. This proves to be an album I can just leave on and let play, where that has not been something I can recall doing with these guys in the past. This speaks volumes in regards to the direction they have taken their song written and when you listen closely to the lyrics of this album you can find that they are very timely to the Corona world. I will round this one up to a 9.