Ah, the sludge. The slow and heavy beats that make you want to grow out your hair just to make head-banging that much better. One of most recent additions that can fall under this category is Seattle's Lords of the North. Dripping in epic imagery and determined to bring blues sensibilities to a metal sound, Lords of the North catches your eyes and ears. As soon as you put on their self-titled debut, you feel like you should be in a large stadium with lots of lights and everyone around you is slowly head-banging, throwing up devil horns with one hand and holding a beer in the other.
Lords of the North essentially play a modern version of Black Sabbath. Their self-titled debut opens with "Souls Come Rising," a simple slow, heavy jam that gets stuck in your head a little too easily. Once the vocals come in, you really think you've gone back in time. The harmonizing high and low vocals combined with the fuzzy guitar and bass tones are a perfect throwback to this era of heavy metal. The solo towards the end adds to this effect even more. The next track, "Follow the Falcon," follows almost the same pattern, but carries it to an almost seven-minute jam session. The style is loose; it almost feels like you're sitting in on a practice session where the members are just experimenting with different arrangements of certain riffs.
Now the first thing that comes to my mind is that this has been done a few times before. Contemporary Sabbath-lovers like Sleep and Bongzilla come to mind when listening to this album, as they made room for the doom metal and stoner rock sub genres that exist today. But even though I'm no expert in this category, I feel like Lords of the North have taken less of a modern metal edge to their sound, and tried to stick more to the original style of their influences. The vocals show almost no signs of screaming or growling like most metal, but sound more like old southern rock bands. I can imagine that there are a few more contemporary bands like this, but it seems fresh to me.
Clocking in over thirty minutes of music in six tracks makes this EP well worth your time. It's well-executed and brings a sound to the table that I don't hear many bands attempting to tackle anymore. The stony riffs are very catchy, in a metal sort of way. This should definitely be on the agenda of anyone who enjoys this type of metal. Grow your hair out before the first listen, though, it'll be worth it.
