IBLISS : "Bintang Fajar"

The second album from this Malaysian stoner doom act finds them attacking your ears with a similar fuzzed out feed back ridden sonic disdain. They jam out the instrumental opening track which could have been banged out by any number of bands. The title track is more melodic and seems to care about the finer points of song writing little more. I can only guess the vocals are being sung in their native tongue as they sit back in the wall of guitars and are hard to distinguish, though not very articulated. They do sing in English on the blues based "Sold Your Soul to the Devil". I think this more laid back approach is a smart move as it contrasts the sludged out rumble that perhaps owed a little too much to Electric Wizard earlier in the album.

"Flower Ov Evil" has a commanding pound, that casts enough creep over the proceedings to appeal to fans of doom. While it's a cool enough riff it drones on it for the duration of the song that does not offer enough dynamics for this to be an instrumental. Sure the guitar solos are great and all but still not enough to justify it being a song. Things get darker and heavier for "Living Like a Sinner" but is that going to be enough to make the song worthwhile?  The riff is broken up more like Black Sabbath, but the vocals take a more staccato punk like pattern. The chorus works pretty well for what they are doing. 

They close the album out with "Killing Spree" . This is another instrumental which does not show a great deal of purpose despite  the fact they do manage for the riffs to change up in a pretty jammy organic fashion for the first half of the song, and a great deal of song time is decorated with wandering f guitar solos, but not really enough melody, to justify the time this song is consuming. there is a few minutes of silence before they come back with what amounts to be a hidden track that is just lingering not from a bass. I will give this album a 7.5, not bad for what they are doing I think the strength of working of bluesy songs on "Sold Your Soul to the Devil" is a side they need to blend more into the other songs. Out September 8th on Regain Records.

Dionysian : Representations of the Id

These guys from Malaysia are more progressive than I expected. They are cleanly sludge and not doom. They are dark at times. Down trodden moments but not a mood of pervading despair. The opening track is 13 minutes long and while that is something that I would not normally be into, these guys take you places and keep it interesting. The vocals are a dry raspy mid-range howl, like most sludge. They bring a great deal of dissonance to the table. Some times they use clean post-rock like guitar tones. On the second song they get a little darker as the song breaks down into more angular passages. There are angular passages that it sails into. Sung vocals show up eventually as well. Their drummer is pretty incredible , the bass is not as good at keeping up with him as it gets clunky when they speed up. It sits pretty forward in the mix.

The song titles are longer than the songs. The third song hits with a more deliberate stomp. The vocals are layered shouts. The abrasive nature of the distortion when they drop into a chug should be enough to solidify them as sludge. There are some indie rock sections where it flows from clean guitar tones. At 16 minutes the song is long for even the most adventurous . Seven minutes in they do lock into a pretty convincing chug. This one does not succeed where the opener did . It should have been cut into two songs, as there is not enough of a thematic element to hold it all together. In fact the pause at the nine minute mark indicates this should have been two songs. The second half has more of a indie rock strum.

Things break down to a more fragile atmosphere on  "Where the Statue Meets the Shore". The bass tone remains a little clunky though I did not notice this until my second pass through the album. The last song is more straight forward with the vocals turning their bellow into an almost sung This album takes a great deal of commitment to absorb, I had to listen to it over the course of several sittings. For that reason even though I like it , this is not something I would listen to on a daily basis.I will give it an 8.5 and reccomend it for fans of sludge's more progressive side.  

4.2