ZOROASTER

If an apocalyptically slow sludge band gets psychedelic on us, is it tuning in, turning on, or selling out? Something tells me Atlanta crunge merchants ZOROASTER won't be swimming in endorsement deals for adding piano and droney chant to "Seeing the Dark", but it does widen their sonic palette in a pretty necessary way, branching out on a tangent that'd probably sit well in your iPod next to anyone from JUCIFER to BIGELF to ISIS.

But lest you think these guys are about to get all white-belt-and-scene-beard on you, "Spirit Molecule" reminds you exactly where the hell ZOROASTER came from, immediately. Every piece of the riff — every note — doesn't feel played so much as lobbed, like a boulder from a catapult. The staggering, loping groove of the song, when it finally kicks in, is a diseased, sludgy drone, the kind of collapsing coal vein mined by the likes of WARHORSE or ELECTRIC WIZARD, and atop it the vocals rasp and scrape like a rusty hinge on a furnace door. Yet even in this archetypal song, there are otherworldly flashes of space-rock noise, little Doctor Who noises well into the nine-minute mark that send this otherwise crypt-rattling doom into MIDDIAN space rock weirdness.

It'd be nice to see these guys get in front of some more people — after all, it's not too much of a mental leap from HIGH ON FIRE's coming-down-the-mountain hessian rock to the tank-in-fourth-gear chug of ZOROASTER playing "Undying". The fact is, and I've said it many times before, this kind of band lives or dies on pure blackened heart alone — tone, tempo and cool artwork (insert gratuitous plug for ass-kicking artist and bud Brian Mercer here) can get you so far, but it's that indefinable oomph between the notes that takes this from a mere academic exercise in the heavy to give it true weight and forward mass. ZOROASTER have got that, whatever it is, and as they color their opaque slabs of metal with a little more dynamics and shading, it only makes the heft of their granite doom that much more crushing.

This might be the best, most vital album of its type since WARHORSE's insanely underrated "As Heaven Turns To Ash" or YOB's masterful "Catharsis" — the kind of once-or-twice-a-decade reboot to our collective idea of what a record (and a band) like this can be. It's all the more impressive because it grows so organically from ZOROASTER's existing sound, adding atmosphere without sacrificing the slo-mo brutality or the sandblasted, nihilistic vibe. It's hard to explain in words how your consciousness can be raised even as you're being pummeled into a grease spot by the fist of God, but with "Voice of Saturn"ZOROASTER manage to do both, and even find time to ruin your speakers in the process. None more doom.