It’s with a dark, brooding and at times extreme take on (e)visceral sludge that Australian five-piece Clagg return on their fourth full-length, Gather Your Beasts. The two-guitar/standalone-vocal outfit were last heard from with 2009’s Lord of the Deep (review here), which saw reissue in 2011 on Obsidian Records. Gather Your Beasts is self-released, but that’s not to say a similar fate doesn’t await it, because if anything, it’s Clagg‘s most realized outing yet, casting off some (not all) of the heavy rock sway in their riffs in favor of focusing on bleaker and tighter-feeling material. Guitarists Anthony Viccars and Dav Byrne lead the charge, with bassist Dase Beard and drummer Tim Byrne marking the progress of their lurching plod with some sizable footprints. Dase and Dav are new as of this collection, but if there’s an even bigger difference to be heard between Gather Your Beasts and Clagg‘s prior output, it’s in Scott Williams‘ vocals.

Tonally, the five mostly-extended tracks of Gather Your Beasts — the longest is opener “Five Curses” (immediate points) at 11:22 and the shortest is closer “Pathways to Oblivion” at 6:30 — are rife with cavernous echo, and where the last time out, Williams was charged with cutting through and dominating the rumble, right from the start of “Five Curses” he comes on buried, overwhelmed by the tidal riffs, carried out with them on undulating groove. The effect is to give the impression of even greater tonal largesse, and it works well, somewhere along the lines of an unritualistic Ramesses, less candlelit-ceremony and more burn-the-fucking-house-down. Neither feedback nor eardrums are spared throughout, “Five Curses” (the title maybe a reference to the five band members or to the album’s five tracks or both) unfolding to a rolling riff not without a sense of bounce punctuated by Tim‘s snare, as Williams unfurls tradeoffs of lower growling and high-pitched screams. Over the course of the title-track and “The Great Mortality,” they vary the level of extremity somewhat, even getting into a stoner shuffle for a stretch in the latter and giving Williams space for spoken word over ambient guitar in the former, but the brutality is never far off and always seems to make a return at just the right time.

That is to say, the crux and the  resounding impression of the album is its heft and that already-noted brutality. Clagg use it well. As a centerpiece to the CD/digital version of Gather Your Beasts — which nonetheless is a vinyl-ready 44 minutes long — “The Great Mortality” takes the buried-vocals and crushing riffs and speeds them up for at least half of the song’s 7:51, starting out with a tense build on drums and guitar before the full rush is let loose. And when it slows down, it’s no less massive than anything else here, though the vocals are more forward than in some places preceding a mournful dirge of a solo that gradually rises from the agonized progression that marches into a fade, leaving the bass as a transition into the more definitively Sleep-via-Weedeater-style boogie that begins “The Dream is Dead.” If Clagg are stoner rock anywhere on the album, it’s here, but the classic heavy swagger is shortlived here as well — maybe that’s the dream dying — and in any case the vocals give it an entirely sludgier edge. So where does it hit the wall? Just about at the four-minute mark it seems like Clagg might be full-on ready to roll, and that’s when “The Dream is Dead” slams headfirst into feedback and excruciating tempo shift. Like someone hit the vibe in the face with a shovel.

Obviously that’s what Clagg are shooting for, so I wouldn’t call “The Dream is Dead” anything other than a success. It might be even more of one than “The Great Mortality,” which is similar in both title and construction, since there’s a more projected sense of build in the later, penultimate track. Eventually, though, the 10-minute “The Dream is Dead” stomps to a noisy, feedback-drenched finish and bleeds directly into “Pathways to Oblivion” as the final cut on Gather Your Beasts, which given the melee surrounding and the sprawl of “The Dream is Dead” seems short at 6:30 but winds up as more than an afterthought, keeping consistently to a pace that finds the middle ground between the duality in “The Great Mortality” and “The Dream is Dead” and rides it to a raucous, solo-topped finish before descending into a minute-plus of effects noise to close out. Clagg remain somewhat undervalued coming into Gather Your Beasts, and while one is hesitant to make “they’re gonna be huge” predictions because frankly that kind of thing depends on more than just the quality of a release and to say otherwise is needless hyperbole, their fourth album is at least worthy of the attention it seems to be demanding, and with the depth of its production, stylistic cohesion and the effort of presentation, Clagg‘s latest lurks like devastation waiting to be found.

Clagg, Gather Your Beasts (2013)

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When done right, stoner/doom riffage and brutal vocals can be a lethal combination. Melbourne plodders Clagg go out on a limb to prove the idea again on their third full-length, Lord of the Deep. The album, which was originally released as five-tracks in 2009 and issued again in 2011 with closing Iron Monkey cover “Big Loader” added on Obsidian Records, is an unrepentantly filthy monster of huge sonic proportions. If nothing else, it proves the double-guitar Aussie five-piece know what they’re talking about. The band, which formed in 2002, chose the album’s name, imagery and thematics well. They’re not the first to marry gargantuan tones with oceanic imagery, but damn if they don’t do it well.

That’s pretty much the story with the whole album, as it happens. Lord of the Deep runs the better part of 66 minutes, spread across the already-noted six tracks, and I’ll say flat-out that there’s nothing revolutionary happening here. I’ll add to that, however, that I don’t think there should be. The dark, dense and pummeling atmosphere Clagg is able to affect through their songs is potent enough that it puts you in a headspace where you care less about what’s being broken down and remade than you do about where your next beer is coming from and how hard you can actually thrust it in the air before spilling any. The first three songs of Lord of the Deep – “Carrion,” “Lord of the Deep” (which has two parts subtitled “They Dream Fire” and “At the Rising of the Storm”) and “Buried” comprise over 40 minutes’ worth of material alone, and though there are a few breaks in the action here and there, moments to catch your breath before the next wave hits, etc., Clagg never stray too far from the brutality. Even as fourth cut “The Harvest” works some clean singing from Scotty (it’s a first-name-only deal across the board), the music is dementedly heavy behind, and the sense is that the throat-searing isn’t over. And indeed it isn’t. In its back half, “The Harvest” (a mere seven minutes long, as opposed to the first three tracks, which are all over 11 minutes, or the first two, over 15) has some of Lord of the Deep’s most brutal growling. We’re talking Cephalic Carnage-style. Real deal.

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