Posts Tagged ‘Sludge’

Deadpop – Ohm

Posted: 16 April 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Human Worth – 11th April 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Name three great but seemingly disparate acts for a collaboration, and the chances are that no-one, but no-one would pick Ghold, Bruxa Maria, and Test Dept. But here we are with the arrival of Ohm by Deadpop, which promises ‘Hard hitting & riff heavy sludge rock’ out of London.

It’s a pretty far-out work, it has to be said. Riding in on a siren-like wave of noise, ‘Saboteur’ announces the album’s arrival loudly and intensely, and it makes you sit up, alright, and your eyes pop when the guitars slam in after some forty seconds – which is a long time when it comes to listening to twitching, glitching feedback. The bass and drums meld together in a thick sludge of overdrive.

I’m not sure what the two parts of ‘Tomahawk’ are about – although it’s probably more likely to be a punk thing or the missile than expensive steak, and they bleed together for forge six minutes of thunderous racket which takes me back to circa 2009 when bands like Pulled Apart by Horses, Blacklisters, Chickenhawk (later rebranded as Hawk Eyes), and These Monsters were exploding on the Leeds scene. Sure, there’s been noisy shit in circulation forever, and grunge may have opened the doors to a wider, more mainstream, audience, but the indie charts and John Peel’s radio show was chock-solid with wayward guitar-driven racket. Human Worth have championed big noise from day one, but have perhaps leaned toward a different shade – or perhaps there hasn’t been anything quite of this nature released recently. And am I really feeling nostalgia for circa 2009? Well, actually, perhaps I am. It was sixteen years ago, after all. Kids doing their GCSE exams weren’t even born then.

I digress – as usual – but it’s relevant when positioning this release, an album that brings the kind of big sonic mayhem that feels less common now, and in context, feels quite different from anything else that’s been released recently. ‘Tomahawk II’ adds the percussive frenzy of Test Dept to the party, calling to mind early releases like the ‘Compulsion’ 12” and Beating the Retreat.

‘Third Metal Wheel’ is a lurching cacophony of lumbering guitars, layers of echoed vocals, and thunderous drumming, the outcome being something akin to Melvins current releases, and while the monster riffology of ‘Dirt Cheap Rage’ provides but an interlude at under two minutes, it’s well placed ahead of the experimental oddity of ‘Disgrace’, which straddles sludge rock, heavy psychedelia, and punk.

The six-and-a-half-minute ‘Yesterday’ summarises the album, really: a thick, full-heft riff slogalong that pounds away, relentlessly, it calls to mind Melvins, but also encapsulates the spirit of all that is stoner, sludge, and doom in a capsule.

The album’s final track, ‘Skygrave’ delivers a driving finish, a blistering blast of full-on, speaker-shredding distortion, with some brief warping samples and disturbances thrown in for good measure, and it’s a truly brain-melting occurrence. If on the surface, Ohm is just another sludgy / stoner noise, the actuality is so much more: this is an album that brings a certain experimental bent, on top of all the riffs. And yes, it does bring all the riffs. And that’s a fact. Ohm is a heavyweight riff-slugger – and that’s a fact, too. This album is a beast.

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Watch: ‘Bug Out Bag’ by Barren Womb

Posted: 27 March 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Nordic noise-rockers Barren Womb are back with a brand-new video for ‘Bug Out Bag,’ taken from their critically acclaimed fifth album Chemical Tardigrade, which got a  thumbs up from us here at Aural Aggravation.

The video premiered at Decibel Magazine, who praised the band’s sound as “angular and pulsating electronic rock/noise/hardcore that lands somewhere between Refused, Daughters, and NoMeansNo on one end, and the ‘Bigs’ (Business and Black) on the other.”

A chaotic burst of gritty visuals and manic energy, the video perfectly mirrors the band’s twisted blend of punk defiance, sludgy grooves, and raw minimalism. Watch it now here:

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Their latest LP, Chemical Tardigrade (Fucking North Pole Records / Blues For The Red Sun), dives deeper into melodic and emotional territories without losing their unhinged core. Tracks like ‘Campfire Chemist’ and ‘Dung Lung’ showcase their evolution while retaining the band’s punchy edge and signature offbeat humor (‘D-Beatles,’ anyone?).

And they’re taking it back on the road with the newly announced More Chemicals 2025 European tour, check out the confirmed dates below.

MORE CHEMICALS 2025
01.05 – CZ Pilsen, Družba
02.05 – DE Leipzig, Zwille
03.05 – DE Bielefeld, Drum Hard
04.05 – BE Licthervelde, PrintbaAr
05.05 – FR Strasbourg, Le Local
06.05 – BE Antwerp, Antwerp Music City
07.05 – DE Osnabrück, Bastard Club
08.05 – DE Braunschweig, Spunk
09.05 – DK Odense, Ilter Festival
10.05 – NO Oslo, Desertfest Oslo
16.05 – NO Trondheim, Pøbelrock
26.07 – NO Hønefoss, Malstrømfestivalen
01.08 – NO Horten, Kanalrock
03–06.09 – SE Örebro, Live at Heart
18.09 – FI Turku, TBA
19.09 – FI Tampere, TBA
20.09 – FI Helsinki, TBA

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Teleost – Three Originals

Posted: 16 March 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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3rd January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Only the middle of March and I’m running behind on releases, so my apologies to Teleost for letting this one slip down the pile, especially as I’d been looking forward to it for some time. Even their earliest live shows, Before rebranding as Teleost, the duo, consisting of Leo Hancill and Cat Redfern, showed a rare musical chemistry, resulting in music of huge, immersive power. Recent shows, such as their recent York homecoming show with Cwfen, demonstrated that they have reached a whole other level of almost transcendental drone, a place where sound becomes a physical force.

But the challenge for any band who are so strong as a live unit, is how successfully can that be translated via the record medium. To commit the sound to tape – or digital recording – is in some way to compress and contain it, to reduce it to two – or even one – dimension. A recording is essentially a listening experience, without the visual element, without the klick drum or the low frequences vibrating your ribs, and all of the other stuff. So how have Teleost faced up to that challenge? Remarkably well. No doubt recording the guitar and drums live has helped retain the huge sound of the live experience. No slickening, studio polishing, just that huge sound caught in real-time, and Pedro at The Audio Lounge in Glasgow has done a remarkable job, clearly understanding what the band are about.

Three Originals opens with the ponderous grind of ‘Forget’, where a sustained whistle of reverby feedback is rapidly consumed by the first thick, sludgy chord: the distortion is speaker-decimatingly dense, and there’s so much low-end you feel it in the lower colon. It’s pure Sunn O))), of course, but then the ultra-heavy drums crash in and the vocals start… Hancill’s approach to singing is very much about rendering his voice an additional instrument rather than the focal point, and the elongated enunciations convey an almost abstractly spiritual sensation.

The first time I saw Earth was following their return with Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, and I spent the entire show completely hypnotised by Adrienne Davies’ slow drumming. It was an experience I shall never forget: it was if time slowed down, and empires could rise and fall between each beat. I haven’t experienced anything similar since, until Teleost. And once you’ve had such a powerful visual experience in a musical context, it’s not only impossible to forget it, but it becomes integrated with hearing the band. And so it is that on listening to Three Originals, I find myself reliving that experience. It’s clear where Teleost draw their influences, but in amalgamating that low, slow drone of Sunn O))) with the more nuanced, tectonic crawling groove of latter-day Earth, they offer something that is distinct and different.

The seven-and-a-half-minute ‘Ether’ blasts in and the sheer density of that guitar is pulverizing. It simply does not sound like two people, let alone that it’s one guitar and no bass. There’s a delicate mid-section consisting of a clean guitar break before the landslide of distortion hits once more. Final track, ‘Throwaway’ is anything but, another sprawling, seven-minute monster dominated by gut-churning sludge and yawning yelps of feedback, while the vocals drift plaintively in the background.

Three Originals is without doubt their strongest work to date, my only complaint being that it simply isn’t long enough. But then, if each track was fifteen minutes long, it still wouldn’t be. In the field of doomy droney heaviosity, Three Originals is in a league of its own.

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Pound Land – Can’t Stop

Posted: 15 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 28th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Pound Land have evolved, expanded, metamorphosed, mutated, from two guys cranking out two-chord dirges, to a shifting lineup of musicians cranking out some wild freeform jazz over murky two-chord dirges. And now we learn that they’ve returned to their roots for this latest offering, their third of the year, no less. As they put it, ‘Can’t Stop sees founding Pound Land members Adam Stone and Nick Harris return back to the gratifying freedom and eccentricity of DIY recordings and lo-fi audio projects. Nine diverse tracks spread over half an hour, this short experimental collection nods to Pound Land’s absurdist ‘kitchen-sink punk’ past’.

Can’t stop? Or won’t stop? Not that they should, either way: Pound Land’s mission, it seems, is to proliferate their dingy bass-driven racket as far and wide as possible, and the world – as unspeakably shit as it is, especially right now – is in some small way better for it.

“Got my joggers on / got my flapjack / got my shaven head,” Stone mumbles laconically as if half asleep, over some trickling electronics at the start of the opening track, ‘Armed with Flapjack’. Then some dirty, trebly guitar clangs in and everything slides into a messy mesh that’s neither ambient nor rock, providing a seething, surging drone by way of a backdrop to the spoken word narrative, which is only partially audible, but seems to be a gloriously mundane meandering tale involving, essentially, leaving the house and going about ordinary business.… But it actually turns out to be more of an internal monologue of an anxietised mind. “I’m alright, I tell myself that, I’m gonna be ok, I can do this… bus, and train, take one thing at a time…” It’s really quite powerful in its way.

And staying with the mundane, ‘Watching TV’ is a spectacularly sloppy-sounding celebration of the mindrot pastime that starts out sounding almost sensitive and with a dash of country in the mix, but slides into soporific sludge, before the choppy ‘Lathkill’, which clocks in at just under two and a half minutes, shifts the tone again: it’s a classic Fall rip, or perhaps Pavements ripping The Fall, a sparse, lo-fi four-chord effort which just plugs away repetitively.

Things get really murky with the pulsating ‘Stuff’, where Stone’s meandering contemplations ring out through waves of reverb, and the whole thing feels – and sounds – very Throbbing Gristle. Dark, muffled, monotonous, it grinds and clatters away, a thick sonic soup, and it’s as primitive and unproduced as it gets. It’s not pleasant, but it works perfectly: it needs to be rough, raw, unfiltered. There’s simply no way this act is ever going to have commercial appeal, and that’s perfect: Pound Land are made for limited cassette releases and playing tiny venues to audiences who will be split roughly down the middle between absolutely loving them and wondering what the fuck they’ve stumbled upon. Pound Land really aren’t for everyone. They’re the anti-Coldplay. They’re for people who relish being challenged. ‘I Spy’ brings that challenge straight away, being different again, the rawest, scratchiest, scratchiest, most abrasive no-fi-punk you’ll hear all year.

Things get even more jarring and difficult towards the end of the album. ‘Janet’s Here’ should be a breezy interlude, announcing the arrival of a guest, but instead it’s tense because the delivery is straight-up demented, and ‘Affordable Luxury’ is a rabid rant, again reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle. It’s uncomfortable, the drawling vocal secondary to the warping drones and scratchy experimentalism. Stripped-back not-quite acoustic ‘EGG’ is a trick: again, it has hints of The Fall doing ‘sensitive’ – like ‘Time Enough at Last’, for example – and it’s delicate, but it’s also not.

And this is the thing. Can’t Stop is their most wide-ranging and accessible album to date. And yet… well, it’s not really accessible, for a start.

Can’t Stop is challenging in new ways, too. Working with so little, they’ve pushed the songwriting in divergent directions, making for an album that reaches in all different directions, while, of course, retaining that primal Pound Land core and purposefully simple, direct approach and aesthetic. I love it, but I expect many will hate it. And that’s the way it should be. It’s peak Pound Land.

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Guiltless – Teeth to Sky

Posted: 4 March 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Neurot Recordings – 7th March 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

If a release is on Neurot, there’s almost a guarantee that it’ll pack some heft, and that it’s likely to be good. And so it is with the debut album from Guiltless, who feature members of A Storm of Light, Intronaut, Generation of Vipers, and Battle of Mice and were ‘born from a love of experimental rock, noise rock, early industrial, sludge, and doom’. Their bio describes their first release, the EP Thorns as ‘crushing and cheerless’, adding that ‘it seemed to welcome the apocalypse looming on our collective horizon.’

The horizon is feeling closer than ever, the Doomsday Clock now set to just 89 seconds to midnight, reported as being ‘the closest the world has ever been to total annihilation.’ Teeth to Sky is a worthy successor to Thorns, and while it may not be quite as unutterably bleak, it sure as hell isn’t a laugh a minute, or even a month. And if anything, it’s heavier, denser, and it’s more layered, more exploratory.

‘Into Dust Becoming’ crashes in on a howl of feedback before the riff comes in hard. No delicate intro or gradual build-up here: just full-on, balls-out explosive power. It’s a veritable behemoth, dragging a megalithic weight and a brutal rawness as it churns away with devastating force. It’s one hell of an ear-catching way to open an album, and serves as a statement of intent.

‘One is Two’ barrels and lurches, the bass booming low while the guitar slices and slews across at jagged angles, and with the roaring vocal delivery, it’s dark and furious, as is fitting for a song that explores human behaviour and the fact that as a species we seem utterly hell-bent on destroying our own habitat. It’s a perverse contradiction that as the most advanced species to have evolved on earth, we have seemingly evolved to bring about the hastening of our own extinction, but then again, perhaps it’s for the best. But considering this, and the state of everything, brings a range of complex emotions which aren’t necessarily easy to articulate through language, or language alone – and this is when one comes to really appreciate the catharsis of visceral noise. And it’s a crushing force that blasts from the speakers on ‘In Starless Reign’; the guitar tone rings a squalling dissonance, and there are some deft tempo changes which accentuate the textural detail and enhance the impact.

They slow things to an eerie crawl on the epic ‘Our Serpent in Circle’ to round off side one, and although it doesn’t exactly offer respite, it does provide some variety ahead of the assault which ensues with the title track at the start of side two, followed by the utterly merciless ‘Lone Blue Vale’, a track of staggering density. Combined, they deliver a relentless sonic barrage. ‘Illumine’ closes the album with slow-paced precision, a harrowing seven-minute dirge designed to snuff the faintest glimmers of hope in your soul.

It’s a significant achievement that Guiltless manage to maintain such a punishing level of intensity for the duration of the whole album: Teeth to Sky will leave you feeling utterly pounded, breathless, and dazed.

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Watch: ‘Among Us’ by Amammoth

Posted: 4 March 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Sydney’s sludgiest stoner outfit Amammoth has dropped a new single, ‘Among Us,’ from their forthcoming record, Distant Skies and the Ocean Flies, to be released via Electric Valley Records on February 21 on three vinyl variants and across digital platforms.

“Our second single ‘Among Us’ is a B-grade psychedelic, sci-fi adventure, kind of like ET on acid,” says Ammamoth about the track.

WATCH the video for ‘Among Us’ here:

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Brain Pills – Faded

Posted: 25 February 2025 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Christopher Nosnibor

It might be a stretch to describe Brain Pills as a supergroup, but the various members of this trio all have form, with guitarist Mike Vest being a one-man guitar-driven noise industry and with 11 Paranoias and Bong being among his extensive catalogue of projects – and he’s joined by percussionist Nick Raybould  and Poundland vocalist Adam Stone. It should be no surprise, then, that this is dark, dense, and gnarly.

‘Faded’ offers four and a half minutes of thick, sludgy, trudgery that feels like an eternity – in a good way. It’s reminiscent of early Melvins – think the slow grinding trawls of Gluey Porch Treatments, rarely over three minutes in length but churning the guts low and slow and feeling twice that.

The sound is immense, a mass of distortion, the kind of overloading, all-out speaker-damaging wall of noise that hits you physically.

The heavy effects on the vocals – magnificently low in the mix – adds a brain-bending psychedelic twist to the megalithic sonic landslide, making for punishing, gnarly perfection.

The band are currently looking for a label to release the album which ‘Faded’ is taken from.

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Chaos Emeralds – Passed Away

Posted: 28 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Cruel Nature Records – 21st February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Cruel Nature are delivering a slew of releases on 21st February – an overwhelming volume, in fact. We’ll be coming to a fair few of them in the coming weeks, but first up, is the second album from Lanark / Reading based sludgy shoegaze project Chaos Emeralds, Passed Away, which comes in a hard-on-the-eye dayglo green cover which is catchy and kinda corny in equal measure.

According to the bio, ‘Chaos Emeralds is Formerly the solo project of Charlie Butler (Cody Noon, Neutraliser, Mothertrucker) with releases on strictly no capital letters, Les Disques Rabat-Joie and Trepenation Records, Chaos Emeralds has now expanded to a duo with Sean Hewson (Monster Movie, Head Drop, This) joining on lyrics and vocals.

Passed Away combines the lo-fi slowcore, shoegaze and doomy post-rock sounds of the previous Chaos Emeralds releases with a more song-focused approach to create a set of scuzzy emo gems.’

For some reason, despite ‘sludgy shoegaze’ and ‘lo-fi slowcore, shoegaze and doomy post-rock’ featuring in the above description, I didn’t quite expect the Pavement gone Psychedelic vibes of the title track which raises the curtain on the album. A primitive drum machine clip-clops away, struggling to be heard above a tsunami of feedback and waves of distortion on ‘Count Me Out’, which adopts the kind of approach to production as Psychocandy – quite deft, breezy and ultimately melodic pop tunes almost completely buried in a blistering wall of noise.

‘Juggler’ brings a wistful tone – somewhere between Ride and Dinosaur Jr – amidst ever-swelling cathedrals of sound, a soaring lead guitar line tremulously quivers atop a dense billow of thick, overdriven chords which buck and crash all about. The way the elements play off one another, simultaneously combining and contrasting, is key to both the sound and the appeal. It’s one of those scenarios where you find yourself thinking ‘I’ve heard things which are similar, but this is just a bit different’, and while you’re still trying to decide if it actually works or not, you find yourself digging it precisely because of the way it’s both familiar and different.

The vocals, low in the mix, feel almost secondary to the fuzzed-out wall of guitar, but their soft melancholy tones, sometimes doused in reverb, add a further minor-key emotional element to the overall sound, especially on the aching ‘Matter’.

When they do lift the feet off the pedals, as on ‘Welcome Home’, the result is charmingly mellow indie with a lo-fi sonic haze about it – and a well-placed change in tone and tempo, paving the way for the epic finale that is ‘In Our Times’, a low-tempo slow-burner which evolves from face to the ground miserabilism into something quite, quite magnificent, Hewson’s near-monotone vocals buffeted in a storm of swirling guitars as the drum machine clacks away metronomically toward an apocalyptic finish.

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Weed Demon – The Doom Scroll

Posted: 22 January 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Electric Valley Records – 31st January 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

The four-piece ‘sludge ‘n’ roll stoner metal band’ from Columbus, OH, come with the description of being ‘the audio equivalent of bong water spilled on a Ouija board’

The Doom Scroll – such an obvious but well-placed piece of punning – is their third album, and lands a full decade after their debut EP – or as they put it, they ‘exhaled a cloud of riffs over the doom metal scene with their debut EP, Stoned to Death… [and] since then, they’ve consistently delivered a steady dose of sludgy, groove-laden stoner doom potent enough to make Beelzebub himself bang his horns.’

For this outing, they promise ‘a reinvention of their signature sludge ‘n’ roll style of doom. Equal parts unrelenting and crushing, yet infused with heavy blues-inspired riffage, this new chapter sees Weed Demon expanding their sonic horizons like never before… Expect doom, gloom, sludge, thrash, death, blues, and even a dash of dungeon synth for good measure.’

That this is an album which contains just five tracks (six if you get the vinyl, which features a cover of Frank Zappa’s ‘Willy the Pimp’) is a fair indication of its form and the duration of said tracks: apart from a couple of interlude-pieces, they’re all six-plus minute sprawlers, with the colossal ‘Coma Dose’ spreading out over more than nine and a half minutes.

And so it is that after the slightly pretentious and proggy-sounding synth-led instrumental intro that is the woozy, wibbly, ‘Acid Dungeon’, they’re thundering in with the rifftastic ‘Tower of Smoke’. It’s a quintessential stoner-doom effort, a mid-paced slab of thick, distorted riffage with a strong Sabbath via Melvins vibe to it. It’s big on excess – of course it is. It simply wouldn’t work without the widdly flourishes that spin their way up from the dense, grainy overdrive that just keeps on ploughing away. And it keeps going on – and on. As it should, of course. It simply wouldn’t be befitting to batter a leaden riff for three or four minutes – you can’t mong out to that.

‘Coma Dose’ starts out gently with some desert rock twangs and a shuffling beat that’s almost a dance on the beach kind of groove, and there are – finally – some drawling vocals low in the mix. A couple of minutes in, of course, the riff lands, and the vocals switch from spacey prog to growly metal, and just like that, things get dark and they get heavy. But for all the weight, there’s still a floaty trippiness about it, a softer, mellowed-out edge: it’s heavy, but it’s not harsh, or by any means aggressive. There are some flamboyant drum fills and a super-gritty bass break over the song’s protracted duration, and at times, it sounds as if the batteries are starting to run low as it slows to a thick, treacly crawl and Jordan Holland’s vocals sound as if he’s being garrotted – and again, this is all on point.

There are elements of hardcore to the shouted vocals and pummelling power of ‘Roasting the Sacred Bones’, while ‘Dead Planet Blues’ brings a quite delicate blues-rock twist and even a hint of Alice in Chains circa Jar of Flies.

Rather than push hard at the parameters of the genre, Weed Demon nudge at the edges in all directions, and this works in their favour. There’s plenty here to keep diehard fans of all things sludgy, stonery, and doomy content without straying into territories that don’t sit well, but then there’s enough to make it different and interesting.

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WALL – Brick by Brick

Posted: 1 September 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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APF Records – 30th August 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Perhaps it’s because I listen to and write about a pretty broad range of music, perhaps it’s something else entirely, but sometimes, I just get buzzed by the prospect of some monster riffage. And that’s what’s promised here with WALL’s debut, Brick by Brick.

Their press write-up got me in half a sentence, describing them as ‘An instrumental 2-piece heavy fucking riff machine, built brick by brick & riff by riff by twin brothers and Desert Storm members Ryan & Elliot Cole’ and the news that ‘debut album Brick by Brick is overflowing with unashamed Iommi-worshipping, instrumental, sludge/doom metal.’

There’s some flamboyant fretwork which adds detail – and a hint of extravagance – to the tunes, but in the main, they keep things tight, with pounding percussion and pulverising, full-weight riffery dominating the album from beginning to end.

Some may balk at the absence of vocals, and listening to the big, overdriven guitar heft of the album’s thirteen tracks, most of which pish their way past four minutes, which makes for quite a long album, I did occasionally thing that some throat-ripping larynx work would be of benefit. But then, how many great albums, even great bands, have disappointed with the vocals, for whatever reason? The number of times weak vocals have let down a strong instrumental sound for me is beyond my counting, so on balance, they’re wise to stick with the instrumental duo setup instead of risk diminishing the material.

The band – and album – are appropriately-named. This is just short of an hour’s worth of relentless riffery, and it’s solid. Like, well, a wall, and heavy, like, er, bricks. These may not sound like revelatory statements, but the point is that so many bands promise the world and barely deliver more than few pebbles. WALL hammer our hard riffs, back-to-back.

‘Legion’ is almost buoyant and the intro at least offers a picked guitar line that sits with the turn of the millennium metal sound before big, thick power chords crash in, evoking the spirit of the 70s and then some. ‘Avalanche’ brings with it some busy fingerwork, something which veers toward excess on ‘The Tusk’, but is kept in check for much of the album, thankfully.

There’s not really anything that’s new on Brick by Brick, but this kind of consistent riffology is comforting in a way, and moreover, they don’t disappoint.

There are some nice, atmospheric and pleasantly musical passages to be found along the way, and they clearly understand the power of the dynamic as well as of volume. When they take things down, it reels you in, before slamming on all the pedals and blasting you away with big, big chords. A few tracks feel a bit like filler, but then again, they provide some contrast, which is never a bad thing when an album is very much centred around one specific thing, namely headbanging instrumental riffs.

There are a couple of covers, and one night question the necessity of their inclusion, particularly closing with a Black Sabbath cover (‘Electric Funeral’): the may have been wiser to cut it on the penultimate track, the massive slugger that is ‘Filthy Doner Kebabs on a Gut Full of Lager’, but maybe they just don’t know when they’ve had enough, eh? But for that, this definitely feels like an eight out of ten in terms of delivering what it sets out to.

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