• Doomed & Stoned in Ireland

    March 14, 2018 - By 

    Since its inception, international metal blog Doomed & Stoned has went to great lengths to appraise and give voice to the heft-inclined communities across time and space throughout its sprawling back catalogue of compilations, from obvious hotspots like Portland, to 70s proto-doom, to current day Asia. Incredibly, they’re all available on Bandcamp, on a name-your-price basis. Being one of our most fertile and certainly overlooked creative grounds, it’s vindicating then, that no less than 24 tracks from all corners of Ireland’s doom, stoner & sludge scene comprise Doomed & Stoned In Ireland, the latest in the series. Outright sludge-doom exports like Nomadic Rituals and Slomatics, who’ve played stoner Mecca –  Roadburn Festival – and beyond, are represented alongside…

  • The Hefty Fog: Sludge in 2015 – The Early Pickings

    March 9, 2015 - By 

    There’s a very noxious chemical present in sludge metal that separates it from all other forms of transgressive music. Even when placed side by side with contemporaries from every god-forsaken, drop-tuned fashion known to the underground, the crooked spoon fury of bands declaring themselves to be sludge stand out like a sore thumb. If punk rock is rebellion and heavy metal is hedonism, for instance, then sludge is a terrible nothingness that is all too human to recognize yet exemplified by sounds which are inhuman. That may sound like a bit of mental gymnastics, but no other subgenre of music has resonated with the…