Bloody hells! This was released before Christmas but I only just received the promo, which is annoying because it certainly deserves a place on my ‘best of’ list for 2012. Vulgaari is an unfeasibly great album which sits somewhere between Acid Witch, Electric Wizard, and Hooded Menace. In fact, perhaps the best comparison is a more powerful and more ‘deathly’ version of the first of those bands; with the same stonerish demeanour but with slower, more gravelly riffs that are precision-engineered to carry an even weightier load.

Vulgaari oozes with treacly slow tempos, rich blues-inflected riffing, and a suffocatingly heavy guitar tone. Although it initially seems like a barbarous, crude record (look at the name, for a start), these elements are actually blended together in a balanced and intelligent way. One of the highlights is Battlestag which evolves from swampily primitive doom-death into a super-fun blues-rock riff as easily as inhaling and exhaling. Match is a wonderfully strange song, which opens with some sublimely melancholic twin-lead harmonies, before devolving into crawling, clomping sludge. The guitar lines are really well-worked, and allow touches of soulful melody to convert these ostensibly thuggish riffs into something quite graceful.

So the sound is an extraordinarily heavy one, but its harshness ebbs and flows. Sometimes (like on 77 74) Vulgaari’s riffing could draw comparisons with rising doom stars like Pallbearer. But at the same time these influences usually appear remote- particularly given that throughout the vocals themselves assume the most sinister death metal delivery, close to Encoffination or Undergang in timbre. I’ve compared them twice to Acid Witch and let me do so again: much as I love that band, tracks like Black Mountain, to my mind, takes exactly the same approach as they do but is executed in a manner that I feel surpasses anything on Stoned or Witchtanic Hellucinations. Hence while I can see those albums being a somewhat acquired taste, only a risible twerp would not like this record.