IN ROTATION: Our most played albums in October 2019

TOM BOATMAN’S OCTOBER IN ROTATION LIST

I moved into a new flat at the start of the month and with half the rent I was paying before I’m now fighting to stop myself splurging on vinyl every day. Winning some, losing some. So there’s been a few purchases getting repeated spins, not to mention the sea of CROWBAR I was swimming in for my recent article on the band. And the Sludgelord Records siren keeps pulling me into the murky abyss.

KARYN CRISIS’ GOSPEL OF THE WITCHES  – Covenant
November 2019, Aural Music 

Over a couple of months where I’ve been listening to a ton of Sludge Metal, KARYN CRISIS’ forthcoming record has been a great, dark, occult, melodic diversion for me. Very gothic, very catchy and this young lady has quite the set of pipes on her. She growls, she croons, rocks out. Some great drumming and cool, eerie guitar melodies on show here too. A nice, unexpected discovery for me.

CRANIAL – Alternate Endings
September 2019, Sludgelord Records 

These four tracks of huge battering slabs of hypnotic riffing have been pounding away at my psyche repeatedly this month. The sound is huge and epic, and the band delivers with power and precision. I hear hints at a range of influences, but CRANIAL definitely have their own identity and this is a very cool 49 minutes of skull-crushing riffs, blended with trippy ambient passages.

ROLLINS BAND – The End of Silence
February 1992, Imago Records

You know those albums you’ve listened to so many times you’ve got it all mapped out in your head down to the last drum? Well, yeah, this one… and after snapping up a second-hand copy of the original vinyl, it’s been back on heavy rotation for me in recent weeks. HENRY ROLLINS has been a huge inspiration since my late adolescence and this album is hard to beat when I want some brooding, self-flagellating, raging, introspection, all to a backdrop of great, jazzy, Hard Rock.

This is a monumental beast of an album… and it does sound better on vinyl! Mmmm mmmm finger lickin’ good.

CROWBAR – Sever the Wicked Hand
February 2011, E1 Music 

To be quite honest I don’t know which CROWBAR album I listened to the most this month, but there’s a good chance it was this one. I foolishly disregarded this one when it first came out, because like an idiot I thought that Kirk going in a redemptive lyrical direction would suck and mean CROWBAR weren’t so heavy anymore. Well I was a dum dum. I now hold this up as one of my favourites by the band. There’s a focus and determination to Kirk’s lyric writing and riffing here that’s just as compelling as when he was documenting a losing battle against depression and addiction. The spirit is strong and the riffs are as crushing as ever.

ROWSDOWER – The Michael Jordan’s Of Suicide
August 2019, Sludgelord Records 

Of all of the great music I’ve discovered during my descent into the world of Sludgelord Records, perhaps the biggest delightful surprise was this disgustingly grimy, dirty, droning, molasses of sludgy goodness. Weird, noisy, dragging and cacophonous, this is the kind of music your non-Metal-listening friends will exclaim “what the hell is this horrible noise?!”. It’s ROWSDOWER, buckle up, bitches.

Tom Boatman