Portland sludge grinders and recent Neurot family additions, Stoneburner, have unleashed their new full-length, Life Drawing. The follow-up to their 2012 debut, Sickness Will Pass, which The Sludgelord appropriately crowned “an ugly, visceral and truly terrifying beast of an album,” with www.metalunderground.com dubbing it “a bruising sludge/doom debut that’s the perfect antidote to the dog days of summer,” featuring nine rumbling odes of bottom-heavy hostility and emotional decay. Swathed in the visually abrasive cover art of J.J. Shirey, Life Drawing promises to hurl Stoneburner’s habitually chest-caving mantras to entirely new realms of earth-deteriorating heaviness.
Damon Kelly spends the record sounding like a demon caught in a trap trying to free himself by any means necessary. Some Can opens with feelings of despair with feedback, crusty riffs that sound buried for a reason, ripped out of the earth with ill willed fingers and hands. Emanating the feelings of trepidation by a schizophrenic mind listening to the sounds in the wall with thick bass that could shake the paint off. Caged Bird’s rumbling moody bass with stringy guitar notes feels like waking up from a freak out, playing a bad mood on guitar. Vocals submerged in guitar fuzz come in at three minutes till they ‘rock’ up the sound at five minutes before a few moments of tranquility come awaiting the Sabbath strings to end. The short acoustic Drift is the closest thing to peaceful noises thus far.
An Apology To A Friend In Need has Maiden’esk trippy grooves with a raspy demonic twist on Tool. Pale New Eyes has ominous beginning notes and atmosphere with guitars pouring notes out like memories falling in raindrops, crashing open on impact. Vocals at around 2:40 are an empty, shaded whisper as the instruments take a slow build, plodding way of storytelling. Giver Of Birth-the second acoustic interlude gives a nice trippy, 60’s campfire feel to the surrounding sludge.
Done is a slow drum-paced surreal walk through the woods in an acid lava lamp atmosphere. Music picks up with heavy riffs that chase listener’s ears farther away from safety or further into mental instability. Riffs and drums climbing the cold metal stairs, gun drawn, trailing the killer. You Are The Worst, a head pounding thrashing against the walls trying to get the voices out in a beautiful multi-personality layered slam dance. The Phoenix ends the show with an epic of almost 18 minutes of guitar ambiance, mixes of tranquility, atmospheric guitar verbiage going heavy then slowing down then finishing heavy.
“Lyrically we’ve always focused on personal matters, and one theme that keeps coming up on this record is the struggle to be a decent person in a world that keeps doing its best to cause you not to be.” J.J. Shirey, who paints our album covers, is part of the Stoneburner brotherhood and we have absolute faith in him. We have him sit in on rehearsals, read our lyrics, and then we send him off to come up with whatever he thinks best suits the material. We feel that this piece absolutely captures the mood of trying to grow and heal, but constantly finding yourself falling back into the darkness caused by emotional and physical addictions. The world isn’t always a happy, beautiful place, and neither is our music.
www.neurotrecordings.com
