ninehertz

From the name alone, you can gauge which perimeter of sludge Kent's Blunt Knife Castration gravitate towards - not for the faint of heart, and not the pure weed obsessed Bongzilla/Weedeater jollies here thank you very much. This is angry music.

The UK has, mercifully, plenty of doom and sludge in its undergrounds, our venues overridden with the unwashed and downtuned, and whilst I'm happy whatever that brings if it allows me more frequent doom gigs, innovation from the norm (in a sound not famous for it) is welcome. And that's why this introduction to a new band in Blunt Knife is impressive and perhaps surprising, because for all the sludge legends they list as influences (and they are not the most obvious ones - instead Cavity and Buzzov*en, which in itself brings hope) - its the name first in the list that is most intriguing - Necrophagia.

There is an infrequent but occasionally evident gory death metal streak fighting for attention against the sludge standards, and maybe even some of the technical and gore obsessed grind of late 90s Relapse, meaning this isn't your bog standard Iron Monkey love in. That mash of blood stained grind into the core of sludge thickness is when this album is at its best, such as on the sit up and pay attention opener Warhead, perhaps inevitably bringing with it a thought toward Soilent Green.

Slightly sadly, this potent coalescence of sounds is shelved for the majority of what follows, instead more what we might expect from the UK doom underground - the lead single Cut and Run sounds like an era or two ago, of the times of Charger and Medulla Nocte, of early Speedhorn and Labrat, a stoner groove even glimpsing through the mire on occasion. There are parallels with current peers such as Nowt or Lifer here. The purer sludge tracks are admittedly hit and miss, some fading into the generic, perhaps not too surprising on a ten track album for a relatively new band.

Don't get me wrong - there's some cracking songs even here - The Misanthreeper's stripped down approach is great, and the excellent Crawl delves back out into adjacent extreme metal to create something rampant and a little creepy. While Live Fast Die Slow is by no means perfect, its more than enough to pay attention to this relatively new entity, Blunt Knife Castration displaying nous and craft to stand out in our busy scene.