SUNROT

Now that summer is a-rollin' in, the need for music that extinguishes all light has never been more urgent. Fuck all that cheerful nonsense. Summer is a bummer and SUNROT are acutely aware of the downside of just about everything. The New Jersey quintet's second full-length album arrives a suitably sluggish six years after their first — the independently released "Sunnata" — and serves as a fitting comment on world events and their deleterious effect on our enfeebled souls. Or maybe "The Unfailing Rope" is just a blast of pure nihilism. It matters not, because whichever way you slit its throat, this is sludge metal of such a virulent strain that you can almost feel scabs forming on your face as it slithers and slams away.

Declaring themselves to be entirely impervious to commercial concerns at the first opportunity, SUNROT begin with amorphous, hissing noise and a gathering sense of hostility. When "Trepanation" erupts with the kind of sharp-elbowed but lobotomized riffs that go hand-in-hand with drug-addled despair, their modus operandi becomes clear. If we are all fucked, why not go down kicking and screaming, and at excruciating volume? The gnarliest slice of existentially ravaged doom since the last PRIMITIVE MAN album, "Trepanation" brandishes its riffs like a psychopath with a bloody syringe.

Next, "Gutter" swaggers in with IRON MONKEY-like levels of animosity, a broken-fingered stoner rock riff underpinning more howls from the piss-cavern. "The One You Feed Pt. 2" starts with a ripple of lo-fi guitar, before a huge, three-note riff takes over, ebbing and flowing to the bitter, shattered end. Brief interlude "The Cull" sounds like a duel between MERZBOW and a truculent harmonica; "Patricide" is a barbaric, droning mantra, with extra riffs. But for sheer, unadulterated hatred and dismay, "Tower of Silence" is going to take some beating this year. It takes a few minutes to wind its way through shadowy, ambient pastures, before building and building in power and poison, mutating into a hypnotic hymn to nothingness over 11 riveting minutes. The closing "Love" — more formless static, augmented with flashes of unnerving spoken word — is a magnificent mind-fuck.

Subtly experimental and yet still steeped in sludge metal's misanthropic stew, SUNROT have hit the coffin nail squarely on the head and left us all picking splinters from our eyes. Abandoning all hope has seldom sounded so alive.