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Bludded Head – Reign in Bludd

Oct 3 • Reviews, The Slumbering Ent • 2520 Views • No Comments on Bludded Head – Reign in Bludd

Jayaprakash Satyamurthy reviews the new album from Bludded Head titled Reign of Bludd, released via Sleeping Giant Glossolalia.

Genres can start to feel like cul de sacs of conformity into which passion, creativity and purpose stumble only to get dragged into a vast unseemly brawl of clones in which it doesn’t matter who wins because they’re all pretty much the same. Sometimes, a band comes along to remind you of the vast badlands just outside town limits, where imagination runs free and the only wrestling involved is with one’s own demons.

Bludded Head’s first full-length comes as just such a reminded. Yes, you can point at the band’s influences – the publicity material names Noothgrush and Corrupted, and sure enough we’re in for a ride through craggy, iterated riffs, tortured vocals and inspired minimalism – but the influences are unusual in themselves, and Bludded Head don’t exactly try to create a carbon copy of their forebears. Their sound is more stripped down, organic like their influences, but pared down, brought to a modicum of tone and dynamics where every note change, every shift in texture and every pulsing backbeat feels like a part of a backporch storytelling session in a slasher flick, very intimate and immediate but somehow rife with unspoken but clearly implied menace.

‘Shitsucker Blues’ is a vast song that rides in on a twangy, plodding figure, like a clearing of the throat, slouching into a ponderous distorted stroll with guttural, pissed off classic-sludge vocals. Soft and loud sections interweave, with unsettling, low-in-the-mix spoken word sequences seeping through in the softer bits. The slow riffs and aching, incoherent vocals sometimes remind me of very early Melvins – never a bad thing – and the song builds to a terrifying peak of raging heaviness before subsiding into a long, sludgy endgame. There are hints of the loose, bluesy groove associated with a lot of sludge music towards the end, but always deconstructed, made just unfamiliar enough not to comfort you.

‘Fuckitdry’ drives piles of steaming sludge in through the gate, catching its breath now and then to let shafts of poisoned sunlight shine through. Never happy to just ride on a riff, the band soon dismantles this opening section, ushering in a creepy, minimalist second act. At a time when a lot of doom and sludge metal is getting too huge for me, too besotted with its own mass and gravity, it is incredibly refreshing to hear a song that works it all down to zero, letting you almost hear skin on string, before shrugging it all off and hurling one last stab of riffage at the speakers.

‘Pouring Rain’ is a big-boned song, filled with rangy, long-limbed, loping beats and guitar figures, from the twangy to the tarry, that are in no hurry to get where they’re going. Again, spoken word alternates with shouted-roared sections. There are tales being told here that may not be out of place in Cormac McCarthy’s Manichean Wild West. There’s a unique majesty in this song, not the bombast of wall-to-wall tone and strategically placed blue notes that passes for it all too often, but an introspective, assured presence that doesn’t struggle too hard for melody or complexity or that big riff, certain of its own pace and direction. This band makes its own maps.

Lastly, for metalheads who value texture and mood, it’s always useful to look into and take on board the things achieved by bands in the shoegaze/slowcore and early emo movements, so the band’s choice to do a very close cover of Codeine’s haunting ‘Pea’ is a great choice to end the album on a quieter note.

Bludded Head aren’t just another mid-list festival stage filler band, lionized by the doom bandwagon for a season and then forgotten. Their sound is a valid, alternate path to the arms race of sheer bulk and stasis favoured on one end of the doom sludge spectrum and the steady crossover into some sort of modern post-sludge style on the other. Stripped down, primitive and expansive, it’s like some new, feral Americana.