Not to be confused with the ultra-hip Californian indie band The Mountain Goats, the Grand Rapids, Michigan, sludge outfit Mountain Goat offer aural cruelty and scraping madness on their Hydro-Phonic Records split with fellow hometown heroes, black metallers The Crowned Virgin. Even with both bands contributing a total of eight tracks, I’d still count it as an EP, since with just four cuts each and a total runtime of 29 minutes, the release gives more of a sampling from Mountain Goat and The Crowned Virgin than it expresses a complete idea from either, but in letting people know what they’re all about, it succeeds entirely. Between Mountain Goat’s (again, not The Mountain Goats) riotous doom maelstrom and the rasping primitivism of The Crowned Virgin, it’s not hard to get what both bands want out of the split. They want you, in pain.

The Mountain Goat formula is relatively simple, but remarkably effective. Feedback, riffs, crashes, screams; the makings of sludge modernity brought to life. But Mountain Goat, particularly from the placement of the vocals – which have a similar unsettling edge to their screams as the original leaders of American black metal or even some of Pig Destroyer’s earliest work – bring the established tropes of the genre into their own context. Their four songs (“Tuskin,” the faster “Necromatik,” “Slumber” and “Covenance Cauldron”) groove like undulating stoner metal, but the sounds are undeniably evil. With production rawer than that of the band’s prior Smoke Filled Land 7” (also on Hydro-Phonic), the meanness of the tracks comes through sounding live and brutal. The droning feedback that ends “Necromatik” more or less sets the atmosphere on its own, and that atmosphere carries across the other tracks to come. As the next wave of sludge rises with bands like Thou and Salome, it’s easy to see how Mountain Goat could fit in that echelon of disturbing sonics.

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