Review: Potemkin ‘Sludge Vol. 1’

Yep. That’s some sludge. A concise little cassette/digital release from Malmö, Potemkin stick right to the sweet spot of True Sludge™ – that is to say downer hardcore, brimming over with feedback and featuring themes of drugs, despair and discontent. With so many bands ‘putting their own twist on it’, or dipping in to borrow sonic elements, or claiming to, there sometimes feels like there’s just not enough actual sludge to go round.

This release just barely scrapes over ten minutes, and that’s including the bits of feedback around the songs, but it’s rubbing me up the right way. Drumming that offers no quarter, shredded larynx vocals and dirty downtuned guitars to put a happy scowl on your miserable face. Bish bash bosh.

It’s hard to think of much else recent that gives me the same sort of shivers, apart from maybe the bass-only Canadians Seum or Medicine Noose from Germany. And of course Moloch, although they’ve been fairly quiet of late, nudge nudge.

So, to the music! Opener Lizard Skin/Human Flesh crawls through angry gutters before giving way to a few punked-out galloping minutes in Meds, which features a fierce hook out of the initial riff’s jabs to the body. The sound is pleasingly direct, and pretty good for a quick DIY cassette job. That’s Side A done and in the grave.

Drumming that offers no quarter, shredded larynx vocals and dirty downtuned guitars to put a happy scowl on your miserable face…

Fucking opinions man, don’t you just hate them? Yeah, I know what you mean, they’re the worst. (And you know what they say: everyone’s got one. Or more than one.) Potemkin know it too and are going to tell you how they feel about your opinions for the next four minutes on Side B through the medium of swinging headbanger Opinions.

There’s not much music here, and seems to be nothing else about the band that a casual search can turn up (website, label, social media… zero – now that is proper DIY) but if this is Vol. 1 I’ll be keeping an eye out for Vol. 2, and if you still spend office hours jonesing for classics like EyeHateGod, Fistula or Iron Monkey, then I’d advise you to keep an ear to the underground as well.

Label: Independent
Band Links: Bandcamp

Scribed by: Harry Holmes