From Cosmos to Chaos

This is an album which really doesn't fuck around; ten seconds into 'Elephaunt' really communicate the entirety of this music. Everything about this band's aesthetic seems designed to make actually listening to their albums to determine their style irrelevant- their name is Heavy Lord, for fuck's sake! Two massive things in a single title! The first track is a giant fucking animal!

Heavy Lord's music is pretty elephantlike in general: lumbering, massive, and steady, smacking aside other, smaller bands with ease. Like a more relaxed and self-assured form of Maegashira, Heavy Lord pounds out slow, head-drooping tunes very much in the style of stoner/doom titans Zoroaster, but with just a little bit more rock and roll and a bit less oppressive drone. This is sort of a middle territory of stoner/doom, deeply rooted in the American origins of the genre (though with definite throwbacks to Black Sabbath), with elements of such found in sudden bursts into frantic soloing over speedy, crashing drumming like about two thirds through 'The Ego Has Landed', but also close to the more extreme reaches of the genre in its burly Dark-Angel-by-way-of-Crowbar vocals and more insistent, chugging riffs. Not content to merely rehash the typical Sabbathisms of a band like Sleep, Heavy Lord occupy a stoner/doom/heavy rock area resembling a less bluesy Mister Bones loaded on horse tranquilizers and cheap liquor.

While the tempo makes occasional shifts upward, it's typically behemothlike in its delivery, with big, thundering steps communicated through crashing tom fills and massively sustained power chords with a guitar tone clearly clawed out of ancient, cracked-cased amplifiers and an infatuation for the oldest of oldschool. Heavy Lord feels like they're more in the improvisational areas of the genre ala Zoroaster rather than the more precisely structured material such as Sleep, and the songs tend to ebb and flow rather naturally, forming organic peaks and valleys where all but one member's instrument will halt entirely before the band comes crashing back in like a truck through the wall of your home. It's traditional music, but it's not entirely stylistically beholden to other bands, and some of the more ominous moments like in 'One Is A Billion' seems to indicate a darker, more lurking underpinning to these sounds than you might notice on first listen.

As you can imagine, I highly recommend this material to any and all stoner/doom fans out there; I can't find anything wrong with this music, and it manages to stay gripping and massive throughout its entire running time (something of a rarity for stoner/doom in general). If you want to get drunk and rock out, I can hardly think of a better album to do it to than this one, and if you're a metalhead, that should signify this as being good as sold.