Blutch

Materia

At a Loss Recordings 2007

As Sludgy as mud from the and bottom of a toxic lake, the riffs of Blutch's new album Materia bury the listener.  Burst is my favorite song with its rhythmic trance of hypnotic strumming.  It sounds almost like some sort of industrial slow motion fan.  Each song on this album pounds with a slightly altered approach to the same theme of slowly bludgeoning the listener until the blood is pouring from their ears.  Smile opens up Materia rather jarringly with its squealing guitar and faster tempo.  Meanwhile album closer Confutatis sets the perfect tone as a lengthy piece of Deep Space industrial ambience.  Beguiling Comer methodically plods along before sprinting ahead with a burst of madness and then slowly dissolves into the murky depths of sea of despair.  Slaughterhouse is also another methodical plodder but Moving Ground starts of as an energetic fist flailing in the air with the spiteful vocals spitting hatred and anger into every pore of my being.  I love music that transports you to a different state of mind and Blutch conjures for me a darkened and abandoned steel processing plant with its creeping shadows and clanking chains and obscure and blackened recesses that devolve into limitless voids.  The echoing drums and vibrating guitar riffs lend a feeling of cavernous depth to each song.  Blutch could very easily be lumped in with the sludge and drone segments of the underground and certainly the Sludge label would fit but they are a little too fast tempo-wise to be considered among the drone brigades.  Though not using traditional sampling techniques and artificial instruments, Blutch has an almost industrial feel albeit one of the truly dark variety, somewhat akin to Skin Chamber.  Blutch's megalithic riffs crush like ten tons of granite.  So epically thunderous and pounding.  Listening to Materia is like being caught between the Anvil and another brutally oppressive Anvil.  Fuck the Hammer!!!!!!!!!!!