Has to be said, what I’d previously heard from Indian didn’t exactly set my world on fire. Heavy, sure. Serviceable, sure. Not something I’d wrench from the turntable and shatter against the wall in a fit of pique, but certainly nothing to get too het up over. This one, though, is a bit of a revelation. A complete sludge metal mauling that combines roiling pummel with parched, blackened shrieks and scuttering electronic flourishes that lurk just beneath the surface. By way of comparison – sonically, experimentally and in terms of sheer psychic hostility – I’d say that fellow Relapse signees Primitive Man are fairly on the money. They both smash your face into the wall, dabble beyond doom’s tried n’ tested parameters and sound like all the hate and woe of the world has led them to make music as pained as this. While the slowmo moments are punishing it’s perhaps tracks like ‘The Rhetoric Of No’ where Indian’s sickly yellow light shines the brightest; providing seething, mid-level churns that stalk you like something dragged from a nightmare and made flesh: shapeless, tentacled, many-fanged and utterly fucking inexorable.
