Crushed

Sludge – unlike its stoner cousins – often benefits from a healthy dose of post rock etherealism. Stoner is at its best when revelling in a form of occultist b-movie horror-cum-melodrama so over the top as to be dismissed as base vulgarity under common law good taste, but in actuality elevates a genre in constant danger of falling into stale box ticking clichés into something truly enveloping; think Electric Wizard at the height of their powers at the turn of the century.

Not so for sludge. Ever since the elongated soundscape metal of Neurosis, sludge has been battling between retaining fidelity to its hardcore roots through rampant tracts on the nature of aggression and the angst of the downtrodden, or else levitating into treatments of celestial wisdom, meditative, long form, and deeply reflective of the theological hole left in the hearts of an increasingly secular people. Yob are perhaps the only act of the recent present that have managed to marry these competing forces into a convincing artistic project. Inverting the “down there” Satanism of Electric Wizard into a form of new age spiritualism, granted weight and legitimacy via the abrasive barbs of sludge.

Enter New Hampshire’s Magnatar and their debut album ‘Crushed’. What at first seems a highly conflicted release, meandering from post rock’s atmospheric minimalism to the punchy groove-on-Valium of atonal sludge, whilst also evincing the genre’s increasingly postmodernist conception of extreme metal as a sampler buffet, with riffs from black metal, melodic death metal, grunge, hardcore punk, and heavy metal all sitting happily alongside each other; metal as montage, sonic history as newspaper cuttings, tracks constructed from fragments of the recent past.

With such a broad cultural remit at their disposal, and a clear desire to reconstruct the fragmented history of sludge into a beast as unified as it is emotively broad, the production may not quite be up to the task of capturing this. The drums retain a mechanistic artificiality that stands in opposition to the loose organicism of the rest of the music. The snare drum has no decay, the bass and toms amount to little more than dull, pillow punching thuds, this, despite the undeniable dynamism behind the performance itself.

The bass guitar equally links up with this mechanistic drive, with a tone overly distorted and lacking in dynamics. Again, this would be entirely fitting for a down-the-barrel barrage of post hardcore animalism, but Magnatar are clearly shooting for a more cinematic undertaking here, yet find themselves hampered somewhat by these aesthetic choices.

The guitars and vocals suffer from no such shortcomings however. The former ranging from wet slaps of earthy distortion to gentle, clean harmonics, soaring and crisply overdriven guitar leads, reverb drenched arpeggios, and the non-music scene setting of ambient sound serving to both place the listener in the moment and create extended passages of tension.

Bongripper can be heard as a key influence here, with their extended exercises in the manipulation of stoner, hardcore punk, post rock, and sludge resulting in sonic monoliths of absurdist urban isolation that spoke of a yearning for a “beyond”, which as a term was essentially a place holder for whatever fantasy the listener had concocted in their mind as to the ontology of existence outside of the crushing mundanity of simply being in the major urban sprawls of the West. It’s telling, however, that Bongripper could perhaps only achieve this ambiguous resonance as an instrumental outfit.

Magnator condense this format, stripping the fat from the lengthy bombast of Bongripper. As a result the contrasts are sharper, the mood swings more jarring, and the overall impact more restless, urgent, fraught. The vocals sit at the apex of this tension, veering from traditional street level hardcore barks of blue-collar outrage, to soaring clean vocals that exercise a degree of emotive restraint despite their resonance, to a more popist approach of straightforward clean singing that would be at home on any post grunge rock album of the mid-1990s. All is parcelled into a concise and austere work in spite of the breadth of musicality that ‘Crushed’ displays.

Debuts are not what they once were. Formatively the preserve of artists finding their voice within genres that were still in the act of definition, now they present as a kind of historical summary, a review of source material and an attempt on the part of the artist to find a gap in the research in works weighted down by their own reference points. ‘Crushed’ is no different, but the grains of futurism, of originality within the conflicted remit of sludge metal’s recent history are more strikingly apparent here than many of Magnatar’s peers. A work as diverse as it is telling of a genre’s limitations, and the desperate struggle to overcome them.

Originally published at Hate Meditations