I am not sure exactly where I stand on the whole stoner-doom-sludge revival that has been taking over the mass of metal the last couple of years. At first I was excited to see bands like Sleep, Pentagram, Saint Vitus and Acid Bath really getting their day in the sun after being underground for so long, but then came all of the imitators and bands who tried to experiment with the genre in ways that simultaneously elevated and sank the sound into something that currently bores me in so many ways, but one of the few bands who actually tread this tightrope and made their sound unique, Weedeater.
Their ability to weave humor and great turns of phrase aside, their music devastates you, sounding completely unhinged in moments, dark and brooding in others and makes you giggle in others. Born out of the breakup of Buzzo*en, lead singer and bassist Dixie Collins creates an ambiance in a live setting that is unsettling at best and disturbing at worst, cross-eyed and shrill his vocals could drive a lesser human being insane, while Shep Shepard and Travis Owen drive the southern sludge ship through the swamp.
Their new album Goliathan, one of my favorite album titles ever, captures the power of their live performance as in previous releases, God Luck and Good Speed and Jason…The Dragon, those albums play like hymnals on a Sunday morning to the stoner doom elite, but something seems vacant on the new record. Almost indiscernible, but may have to do in part with the presence of so many interstitial tracks that attempt to offer dynamics, or give the ears a palette cleanse before riffage blows out the speakers, yet unlike previous ventures in this area on Goliathan they feel forced and distract from the overall piece.
That being said, it is probably the only weak point of the album, it simulates almost identically what they had done on earlier albums, but the meat and potatoes boiled in the heavy riffs that somehow are simple yet undiscovered over years of metal. Their repetitive drone blasts away at you over and over again as always leaves you hungry for more. Weedeater makes six minutes feel short, and three minutes last a lifetime, combinations of repetitive noise then a swift change and finding that rhythm that brought you in to bring it back home at the end…every song, their style and sound unmistakable.
Intense songs like “Joeseph (All Talk)” “Claw of the South” and the title track scorch your senses with a visceral timbre like no other band can accomplish. Weedeater did not reinvent themselves with this album, far from it, instead Goliathan represents the bands present state perfectly, another notch in their proverbial belt, stretching out into a wasteland of noise metal and providing the down home comfort of a glass of iced tea on a summer day and give me hope that sludge stoner noise doom might still have life lingering.
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