WORMWOOD – WORMWOOD

Couple old friends getting together to make heavy depressing/empowering racket. Pupecki also plays guitar in (doomriders) and Bevilacqua was their original drummer!!! Driven by a bestial, hard-hitting mid-tempo grind and a distinctly unpolished, ugly, and bottomless bass rumble, the wheelhouse of this band is clearly the rhythm section. Above the maelstrom, the guitar alternates a discordant ooze with effect-laden sludge atmospherics and consistently unsettles you with brutally effective tritonal dissonance before spacing out in smooth doomed slow jam riff territory (sometimes within a single phrase). In the length of 18 minutes and 5 tracks they will keep your head bobbing even as the groove wobbles and weaves in gruff almost-disharmony. Ragged feedback and thick-as-hell crunch, set the abysmal mood for the submerged hypnosis of the main riff in ollow Black Eyes’, which barely moves on the fretboard yet somehow feels liquid and mobile. The strange and phenomenal lead near the end howls with a curious sort of offset wavering/watery feel that matched the yawning void of the verse in a perfectly subtle way.