Music Banter - Conan - Blood Eagle (2014)

I ran a quick search to see if anybody had touched on this yet, clearly it is at least known among some of you, but I didn't see any reviews. Fortunately, one of my favourite things to do in life is describe this album to people.

CONAN - BLOOD EAGLE [2014]
Sludge / Doom / Primordial Ooze

NAYN / TENN

This is quite possibly the heaviest album ever fabricated, in any genre, and I challenge any mortal to find a realistic competitor. Conan are the emperors of Skyhammer Studio, which has become notorious in the doom metal scene over the last year for their notoriously thick and humid production style, which is masterfully demonstrated by this release. This album is like the musical equivalent of a gargantuan stone mountain slowly tumbling end over end down an even larger mountain. It's like a great pyramid covered in magma slowly meandering through space, severely distorting space-time with it's incalculable mass. It's like your ear drums are being mulched by ferocious acoustic waves into a syrupy pulp to be served atop a thick stack of pancakes, at the table of a bearded club wielding giant. It's like each massive drum has been fabricated from conglomerated bone matter and animal hides, swung upon expertly by a genuine Cro-Magnon tribe. It's like the sounds produced by plate tectonics and sea floor spreading, the sound of a glacial valley being carved over thousands of years, the sound of an abandoned forestry excavator rusting in a humid climate. When you play this album on a decently robust sound system you can feel the air pressure changing around you, the atmosphere feels thick and dense, you feel like you've been forcefully massaged by a prehistoric mammoth hoof for days on end.

But for real, everything here is remarkable. The grooves are monstrously intoxicating, the production is crisp, unique, and unimaginably heavy, the theme is consistent and the atmosphere is dense, and the musicianship, while simple, is that of a group that knows exactly what they sound like and how to maximize the effect of their style. All fans of sludge as a genre owe it to themselves to bathe in this release, all fans of music as an art owe it to themselves to at least take a moment to marvel at the production here.