Holocene #6

Bands really hate labels, don’t they? When I was looking up The Mass, I got “Thrash/Crossover/Avant-Garde Metal”, but listening to this EP makes me think stoner rock along the same lines as High On Fire (most of the time) with a saxophone. Those slower moments really go off somewhere else, the closest I could compare some of those bits would be to 60’s jazz, and certainly that saxophone adds to it.

The overall pace is a bit quicker than stoner rock, although the slightly soft, underground production style drums and fuzzed out guitars will keep reminding you of that place. The band really shines when they take you in for the mammoth closer, “I Lirska Bistrica”, where they put those low-tuned fuzzy guitars to good use in that long, drawn out song, with little bits of out-of-time bursts jutting out before the instrumental settles into a marching pace for guitar, sax and bass solos.

It’s almost completely worth it for the long instrumental at the end, although while really interesting, I didn’t find the other songs to be quite as capturing. The oddball concept is completely sound though. Or would unsound be proper? The whole thing is teeming with insanity, which of course is the whole point.

Originally posted at www.waytooloud.com