Loincloth – Iron Balls of Steel
Southern Lord - 16th January 2012
Southern Lord have built their reputation for releasing only the heaviest, darkest, heaviest of shit. Home of Sunn O))) amongst others, Southern Lord is essentially the home of heavy.
The press release describes the label’s latest signings, Loincloth, ‘as a riff-mangling instrumental/progressive act’, and while press releases are notorious for being a load of hyperbolic bollocks, in this instance, it’s actually an understatement. ‘Iron Balls of Steel’ is every bit as weighty and as hard as the title suggests, and then some.
The band’s name conjures the primal, a sense of primitivism, and it’s entirely apt: ‘Iron Balls of Steel’ is nothing short of mammoth. It’s not pretty, it’s not subtle, but if you’re on a quest to return to the primordial rock slime, Loincloth provide megalithic chunks of undecorated, heads-down behemoth guitar riffage and earth-shuddering rhythms hewn from colossal slabs of basalt that can’t fail to do the trick.
Most of the sixteen tracks are short – under two minutes long, in fact – but segued together, they form one gargantuan whole that grunts like a slain stegosaurus.
|
Still, it’s not all po-faced heavy metal thunder: the song titles – like the OTT tautology of the album title itself – are wryly humorous: try on ‘Underwear Bomb’ for size, along with the puntastic ‘Hoof-Hearted’, ‘Sactopus’ and ‘The Poundry’. There’s also a grinding slab of rock entitled ‘The Moistener’, which could be interpreted a number of ways, all equally smirk-inducing. But when all is said and done, the titles are very much secondary to these hard-hitting weight-laden workouts. This is, of course, exactly how it should be. Loincloth, as prime exponents of prog-metal par excellence, aren’t about surface, but are all about depth – and ‘Iron Balls of Steel’ has depth enough to sink a drill halfway to the earth’s molten core. Yup, Loincloth have got balls alright.
|
