Before I could finish this month’s podcast, there were a couple goodies I want to pick up physical copies of for track-ripping, and as I was on my way to the Brighton Bar last Saturday anyhow for that Clamfight show, I figured I’d stop in at Vintage Vinyl and sample their earthly wares. It’s rarely a decision I regret.

I had made a list of what I wanted to pick up — and, of course, forgotten it — so I grabbed what I could remember and stumbled upon a record called Slowly We Rock by Spancer. It’s not often I find something out of the blue like that. Not that I hear everything that comes out (from what I’m told the latest Rose Kemp album is quite good and I know literally nothing about it), but more often than not when I’m record shopping, I at least have some idea of what I’m looking at. But from the meditative cover, the album name, the fact that it was released on The Church Within and the three listed tracks on the back of the jewel case all timestamped at over 10 minutes, I made an educated guess that this was something I needed to hear.

Turns out I wasn’t wrong. Slowly We Rock is the second full-length by Spancer, a double-bass/single-guitar five-piece who hail from Germany and got together in 1999. The band’s prior album was 2001’s self-released Countdown to Victory, which followed a 2000 demo, and they also put out a split with countrymen sludgers Versus the Stillborn-Minded in 2005. To date, Slowly We Rock is all I’ve heard from them, and it’s a righteous blend of stoner heaviness, doomed low end, throaty shouts and the occasional excursion into more metallic territory.

The latter comes up a bit on middle cut “Throne of Wisdom” — the only one of the three tracks under 15 minutes long — and it didn’t occur to me until I heard the deathly growls on closer “Soulcadger” that the title Slowly We Rock could be a reference to the first Obituary album, 1989’s Slowly We Rot. I don’t know if that’s actually the case, but it’s a connection I enjoyed making listening to the slothful Church of Misery feel to the track, and it occurred to me that I can’t name a band who ever really took death metal low growls and paired it with purely stonerfied riffs. If you know of someone who did it and did it well, let me know. I’d be interested to hear it, since it’s something Spancer touch on late into Slowly We Rock (they’re in the background and contributed by producer Meiserati), but by no means the crux of their arsenal.

It was a lucky buy, all told. The Church Within usually puts out good stuff, and though this is one of the label’s earlier releases (catalog number CW003), it could just as easily have gone the other way. Spancer reportedly recorded a new album last year called Greater Than the Sun that The Church Within is set to put out sooner or later, and now that I have some idea of what I’m getting with it — barring any vast changes the intervening four years may have made in their sound — I look forward to what Spancer will do next. Heavy and stoned, for the converted.

Tags: Germany, Spancer, The Church Within

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2011 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Buried Treasure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.