Northern Ireland-based trio Slomatics get down with some vicious tone worship, but I have the feeling that if you took this stuff and played it on an acoustic guitar, it would still sound heavy. Their latest single, The Future Past, follows last year’s A Hocht full-length and sees the Belfast three-piece returning to the very beginnings of the band circa 2004 and refining some of their earliest material.

With two songs — “Running Battle” and “Son of Ampbreaker” — The Future Past doesn’t bring about quite the same kind of lurch that “Beyond Acid Canyon” from the most recent LP had, but even for being just slightly faster than that or Slomatics‘ contributions to their 2011 split with Conan (review here), neither cut lacks for weight or crater-honing force of impact. “Running Battle” launches an onslaught of low end and then cuts through it with blown-out vocals and buzzsaw leads, the drums holding steady on a still-plenty-slow stomp that “Son of Ampbreaker” varies from without fully departing.

The second track has a more open feel in the guitar and bass — as much as something so pummeling could be called “open” — but even here, the trio attack on all fronts, drummer Marty providing the shouts that seem to puncture the thick, thick, thick wall of tone, echoing with a destructive psychedelia made visceral through added noise and the let-me-just-point-it-out-again-because-it’s-so-fucking-heavy plod.

No word on a physical release, and the vibe I got was that going back and taking on these previously unrecorded songs from their early days was just something Slomatics did for fun or perhaps to exorcise at last the nagging demons of these riffs, but either way, if they’re just blowing off steam, that’s some viciously heavy steam to blow off. If you haven’t yet caught on to Slomatics‘ bludgeonry, The Future Past might be a great way to get introduced, and it’s for that reason that I made it The Obelisk Radio‘s Add of the Week, and swiped the stream from the Slomatics Bandcamp that you can check out below:

Tags: Slomatics, Slomatics The Future Past, The Future Past, The Obelisk Radio, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 13th, 2013 at 10:55 am and is filed under Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.