ninehertz

The certified, bonafide best thing about split releases? Finding new bands. Head in for one you know, flip it over and find a new love, hitherto unknown. This is how I came across Crud, from Florida, a few years back when they appeared alongside Black Tomb on a double sider I’m very fond of.

Fast forward seven years and I now find myself somewhat enamoured with their belated return, in the form of Human Decency, out on the trojan label Tankcrimes, alongside Totem Cat and Salvaged Records. It has all the ingredients for a great sludge record and the output more than delivers on the promise.

It is heavy, slow and fiercely political. The first track is named ICE Breaker which tells you a lot – hear how crunchy sludge is enlivened by its evident anger, straddling the grief filled misery end of the genre with the grooves of the opposite. Then listen and read the lyrics – a missive against the government-sponsored anti-immigration terror in the US and the people who work for them (“never forgive, never forget, what you did, for a fucking paycheck”).

One of the first words spoke on the following Demiurge Blues is “corrupted” which is doubly apt, as a musical reference point too. There’s an Eyehategod vitriol running through the album, but there’s more to them than simply the next cab off the rank whose sole aim is to mimic the New Orleans greats. The longer it goes, it reminds me more and more of the UK sludge underground instead, with its grimy hardcore roots, while on more than one song their doom congeals and decays into death-doom misery.

Crud balance their inputs extremely well, which benefits the release immensely – whether it’s the outright blackened spite of the darkest edges of doom, the death metal gruesomeness and the more groove laden swinging times of the lighter minded end of sludge. This morass of morbid noises makes for a wholly satisfying album.