Sludge is an often maligned genre that gets missed by most people, not exactly Doom, not just stoner rock, part grunge and all kinds of heavy! Sloath are a band that ploughs the rugged furrows of the genre with a blade of solid lead. It’s heavy and ponderous and so fuzzed out that the howls of the chanting vocals seem to be drowning as they emerge and submerge from the crushing guitar and bass wall of grunge. If you like your riffs slow and repetitive each one more ground out than before until your speakers are having trouble with the overdriven recording than Sloath are for you.

Now a lot of bands do this kind of thing, it’s not hard to play roughly in time if you play slow and it’s easy to crank your amp up to eleven but what’s not easy is making sure what you do is interesting and has a dynamism about it. As a five piece these guys start with a bit of a trad blues-ish riff cycle but then take it into a droning, psychedelic, noise direction, all sub bass and guitars that play amongst each other’s feedback, layering up white noise until your ears are picking out the tiny changes in the hiss and crackle and the doom laden riffs stop trying to keep time to some kind of beat and come rolling out when they’re good and ready!

I’ve only once seen them play live, in a now closed basement club in Brighton, the sort where the sweat drips of the ceiling before the audience even get in, they were so loud that my ears rung for day after but it didn’t matter too much because it was at the those volumes that the real crushing weight off those barely held together riffs really fell into place, their singer Kai rocking back and forth summoning up the kind of moaned laments reserved for the denizens of the second level of hell.

I can easily get bored at gigs even when I’m watching bands I really like but Sloath kept me totally connected with the ear blistering, feedback surfing moment, throughout their set which in my book means they kick ass.

If you want the an example of them at their blast explosion best then check out their Myspace for the song “Cane Trader” which was featured on their recent self-titled, vinyl only, 12” EP available on the Riot Season label. The EP has only three tracks but each one is between eleven and twenty two minutes long and the artwork is super.

The video here of them live has the strange element of relatively good sound quality and implies they are cleaner sounding than they really are, while their actual demos and studio recordings strangely serve as a better representation of them live!
Finally if you live in Spain which probably most of you reading will not then you can check them out when they do a mini tour over there in November!

- Fokkawolfe