Materia

Sludge, shmudge! Belgian trio Blutch have always transcended the fundamental trappings of classic sludge by infusing their songs with unexpected twists, running the gamut from avant-garde atmospherics to traditional, pure doom. Their third album, 2006's Materia, quickly makes a statement in this regard, lurching into action with a 44-second song fragment, sardonically named "Smile," and then keeping the listener guessing by way of frequent experiments — both brilliant and atrocious — through to the end. For example: "Cut a Hand" is a mere interlude, but a memorable one; "Beguiling Comer," a painfully tuneless dirge that occasionally combusts into fierce percussion; "Burst," a comparatively lightweight staccato riffing exercise of stupendously tension-building proportions until whispered vocals finally set in; "The Black Caped Man," another mere snippet that's surprisingly fully formed. Now arriving at its grand centerpiece: eerie murmurings of Brahms' famous bedtime lullaby precede the ungodly heaviness of "Masamune"; a direct descendent of Sunn O))) or Boris built on minimal but sustained riff rumbles that take the crown as this disc's most seismic reverberations — and that's saying something. Unfortunately, no subsequent song stands a chance by comparison — not the widespread feedback and hyperactive drumming heard in "Stigma"; not the quasi-industrial dissonance and stutter-stomping engines of doom driving the overlong "Slaughterhouse," nor the refreshingly brief schizo-bursts of "Moving Ground"; not even the bowel-loosening drones and amusingly appropriate submarine beeps comprising the album's Earth-inspired finale, "Confutatis." Inconsistency, in the end, is Materia's Achilles' heel, but the overall balance still leans towards the upside thanks to a handful of truly peerless tracks.