Shrinebuilder

This album is a sort of summit conference of underground heavy music. Guitarists and vocalists Scott "Wino" Weinrich (the Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Spirit Caravan, the Hidden Hand) and Scott Kelly of Neurosis are grizzled veterans whose hoarse, guttural shouts and instantly recognizable, distorted guitar tones carry the authority of years of hard touring and introspective yet still crushing rock, while bassist Al Cisneros (Sleep, Om) and Melvins drummer Dale Crover shake the earth with their gigantic rhythms. The five tracks were laid down in three days, with some minor overdubs done shortly afterward, and they have the organic feel of jams transformed into cohesive songs through application of the group mind. Wino's usual biker-rock riffage is frequently replaced by a more psychedelic, drifting sound with long sustained notes floating over Cisneros's trance-inducing basslines (Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold" seems like a bigger influence than the Black Sabbath catalog, particularly on "Blind for All to See"), and Crover's tribal pummel is the perfect rhythmic base for these journeys. "Pyramid of the Moon" features Cisneros as vocalist, his nasal monotone recalling Sleep's Holy Mountain album, but his superior band makes this a substantially better proposition. Indeed, each of these four men seems to get the other three to step up his game in some ineffable way -- Wino sounds more engaged than he did on any of the Hidden Hand's three albums, and Kelly's contributions are much less boring than the last few Neurosis discs have been. This is a supergroup that could have gone horribly wrong, but instead has revealed itself as something genuinely great. ~ Phil Freeman