With a line-up featuring Mastodon vocalist/bassist Troy Sanders, Queens Of The Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and At The Drive-In drummer Tony Hajjar, you’d expect this supergroup to be heavy, heavy alt.metal heaven, and you’d be right. Despite easing us in with a deceptively gentle, doom-laden intro on Violescent, it’s not long before they come in with an elephantine desert-rock riff that could tear Arizona a whole new Grand Canyon.
Stripped of the sonic chaos of Mastodon and ATD-I, the rhythm section are free to just let go and pummel, proving a perfect foil for Sanders’ caveman roar. Meanwhile, the frequent quieter, more considered moments, such as the creeping, ghostly Dublin, have an underlying sense of spaced-out dread.
This is as oppressive as any brute force they could mete out – their cover of Portishead’s sublime Roads, with its portentous industrial heartbeat, is both beautiful and terrifying. This is one supergroup we can get behind.
