Primitive Man - Caustic

Caustic is definitely the most fulfilling and exhausting sludge metal release to come out this year, blasting through the ears with booming guitars and the truly aggressive and muscular death metal vocals to match their power, it leaves a vacuous charred wasteland of despair in its path. Like most sludge metal releases, it doesn’t really “change up” much across its track listing, aside from the industrially noisy instrumental closing track and the occasional moments of excessive guitar noise to attack the listener and the few noisy interlude tracks, but it doesn’t need to. Its hypnotic assault is immobilizing and it traps anyone in hearing range within its soul-eating grasp. The album’s singular motive is the uncomfortable haze it invokes and the depressive atmosphere it sustains, and at that it is thoroughly successful. I wish I could talk about it with more substance because it’s certainly one of my favorite releases of the year, but its objective is so upfront and its method is so concentrated, I’d basically be describing the same massive wall of black death sludge metal sound crushing my head over and over again.

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