Slug Lord
Transmutation

Eye catching dark figures, a trio standing in robes and stuff is how Finnish trio Slug Lord present themselves. Kind of ironic considering the darkness of the day after a trio of dark men taught the world about Charlie Hebdo and their caricatures of Muhammed and Muslims, somehow I doubt their idea was to make that magazine with a very small circulation into a martyr for the freedom of speech. But the world is full of irony I guess and speaking of which, these guys seem to be somewhat ironically presented by their label. Selling points is an eye catching cover art, timeless slug-inspired doom metal and five overlength, icecold hymns for every sludge-doom-fan – guess that will be a good thing for a very warm summer day in a time of global warming.

Sludge is a genre that I suppose falls within the doom metal genre, performed in slow songs that are often very long and quite monotonous. That is just about how you can describe these guys, their music is slow and fairly heavy but it is still also quite mellow and their singer is grunting in a way so that he is not taking focus from the instrumental side and overall atmosphere. They do not really offer anything that stands out from the overall sense of the genre and bands in that same genre, I am sure that the fan of the sludge thing can count countless bands that sounds just the same as these guys. Five tracks, near fifty minutes and no real variation makes this a quite long album despite the very short track list.

I am not impressed but then again, it isn’t really my genre and fans of said genre will surely be more impressed than I am. I have a hard time seeing what is so great about being monotonous, slow, mellow and drab in a way that makes the album a long wait for its end. I think that a good description of what we get with this album is a grey day with a slight drizzle falling from the darkening skies and soaks everything in a small film of moisture. Kind of like the day we have today, but the good thing about this album is of course that you can chose not to live through it again, the other thing is a bit harder to ignore but the good thing is that they failed in the area that really counts. I wouldn’t say that this band fails in their mission to bring out good music but it is not to my taste and I doubt that it appeals to the wider range of music fans.

In the end I will use my freedom of speech to explain that I don’t really like anything about this album, well the cover is nice so there is at least something. There are no tracks or parts that stand out in a positive regard and the album becomes a gloomy thing that I grow tired of very quickly, and I am quite happy that I am done with it now even if writing this review was quite difficult considering the difficulty to figure out something to say about a band that didn’t really make any impression on me, but it often seems that the pen turns out to be mightier than the sword in the end. This trio may not appeal to many but those of you who are fans of said genre might find them appealing as they do use all the tricks in the book of sludge-inspired doom metal.

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