Iron Monkey : "Spleen And Goad'"

I am going to hold off on initial judgments and wait until the second song to hear if things change. Now well into "Concrete Shock" it seems my first thoughts were correct all along so I guess I might as well share them with you. This might be the worst vocal performance I have heard on a metal album this year. In some ways, it works with the stomp of this neanderthal minded sludge they are bulldozing you with. It sounds as if a band asked a retarded teenager to scream into a microphone. It is truly difficult to get through each song, if the vocals were further back in the mix it might be more tolerable. The riffs are big and heavy, but nothing new for sludge metal. 

Things get off to a rumble more often than not with a less spastic delivery for the growls to "CSP". The redundancy of their songwriting is staggering even for this genre. The fuzzed-out bass line intro appears more than once. They lock onto drones then have demented howls rant over them seems to be the most common formula employed. The guitar solos are just noise, the drummer and bassist being the only legitimate players in this band. I assumed "Rat Flag" was going to sound more like Black Flag, but this is not the case, though the tempo does pick up to a marginally more punk pace. It does slow down into the kind of pounding that is more typical for these guys. 

By "Lead Transfusion" I have come to the conclusion that these guys want to be like Eyehategod but without any of the songwriting smarts. Sure they are heavy, but that is pretty much all that is going on here.  "Exelexed" is the biggest dynamic shift they speed up when they would have been better off slowing down, but at least the song will go by faster as this album has become something I am enduring rather than enjoying. There is more of an angular twist to the riff of "The Gurges". I will round this down to a 3. 5, as there was very little I found redeeming about it.  Sadly Relapse Records is relating this. 

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