CHAPSTIK

We get dozens of unsigned bands' releases every day, submitted for review. Here's how to make yours one of the few that rises to the top of the pile: a) come up with a song title as ridiculously funny as "Egregious Philbin", b) tour with Tesco Vee and THE MEATMEN and live to tell about it, even if your frontman is a soft-spoken vegetarian who looks like a mill-town librarian, and c) crank out barbed-wire bricks of stupidly catchy, surly, abrasive rock and roll that boogies while it kicks your head in, like a less overtly hostile BOULDER or a nerdier 16 with a sense of humor.

Compare it to whoever you want, but these hardscrabble Detroit-area lifers dish out this deceptively simple riffage, somewhere between sludge and stoner on the classifi-o-meter, and they deliver it at a volume and intensity designed to scour your eardrums like steel wool pads. Vocals are bellowed, snarled, or delivered in a mock-theatrical Valhalla yell, depending on what the none-too-serious subject matter at hand... but nothing about the music suggests these guys are kidding for an instant. This is heavy, punishing, bruising stuff, from the blast beats of the title track, to the meth-crisped boogie of "Mustache", right down to the shambling crunge of eleven-minute closer "Goat Justice League", which outdooms SLEEP and spends its latter half crumbling down the mountain in a finale that will leave the listener physically exhausted.

CHAPSTIK have been around for years, in various incarnations, flying under just about everyone's radar. But their viscous, ear-bleeding rockin' sludge would lay waste to your favorite stoner/doom/whatever band without even trying. If you worship at the altar of the riff and you like your metal sandblasted of all pretension and delivered with the subtlety of a cement truck, then CHAPSTIK's self-described "turbo-crust" deserves a chance at making the rest of your record collection look like ass.