ROT ROOM – 6th December 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Super-spiky, not-really-legible font? Check. White on black cover art? Check. Goats galore? Check: in the title and on the cover. This is going to be some gnarly metal din, right? Right. Sometimes, you can judge a book – or a record – by its cover.
Goatslayer is the second EP of 2024 for North Carolina ‘southern-fried sludge quartet’ Fireblood, following the Hellalujah EP, released in April.
They promise a work which ‘take[s] the genre in a somehow meaner, more extreme direction, they employ massive atonal guitars, booming drums, and churning low end to create a caustic, thick-as-molasses sound that has a physical weight to its thunderous mid-tempo grooves. Lumbering ever forward, each stomping beat comes laden with the threat of eruption, and when the top does blow it’s an explosion of seething rage.’
While I wasn’t aware that theirs was a specific genre, I’m on board with this, not least of all because the EPs four tracks are magnificently mangled, feedback-strewn heavy as hell riff-fests with an obsession with death.
‘A Perfect Place for Death’ is a lumbering chuggernaut, with overdriven power chords galore and processed, fucked-up vocals which add a deranged psychedelic edge to the purgatorial experience. As much as there are hints of Melvins in the blend, the vocal treatment reminds me of Henry Blacker, knowingly over the top and uncommonly high in the mix, but everything congeals into a thick black tarry sonic soup. ‘Death Comes Rolling’ thunders in hard, beating its chest and stamping its feet against an industrial-strength riff and roaring, glass ‘n’ gasolene gargling vocals. It ain’t pretty: it’s not supposed to be. It’s not subtle, either, but again, it’s not supposed to be.
They slow the pace to a crawl on the trudging ‘Burning Underground’, and it very much feel like being dragged by the collar down an endless staircase hewn in rock, the temperature rising as sulphurous lava and eternal flames draw ever closer, before ‘A.I.G.O.D.’ locks into a relentless and powerful groove, and pummels away at a dingy riff for seven and a half punishing minutes. Around halfway through, something twists and suddenly it seems to get even denser, sludgier, heavier, the guitar overload threatening to do damage to your speakers. The long, slow fade comes almost as a relief in easing the cranial pressure. This is a beast, and no mistake.
AA
Aural Aggravation 