Review: Potemkin ‘Sludge Vol. 2’
Ah mate, sorry I’ve not been answering the phone, I’ve been trying to make some changes y’know, and just needed to avoid situations where I might end up… making bad decisions again. What’s that? Just a little four-track DIY sludge release? Well yeah, I suppose one quick taste can’t hurt…
Relapse in style with Potemkin. The dragging hardcore riffs are back, in the best hopeless tradition – that fine bloodline of Grief, Fistula, or indeed Iron Monkey and all those UK connoisseurs of suffering. Opener The Flophouse has the most Mike IX Williams delivery of Potemkin’s output so far, that unhinged ranting that works as a kind of anti-hook against the riff. Flayed with naked feedback and distortion, the sound is raw as with their first release.
We’re in Thomas Hobbes’s territory here regarding the life of man – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. And while it’s unlikely that (however prescient) he was thinking of this particular throat-nodule of filth when writing Leviathan in the mid-17th Century, the sense of ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death’ oozes from Disease and Pops.
Potemkin have found the bile to cough up another four quick tracks in the same vein of brutal simplicity…
Not hanging around, they careen into Blitz, an upbeat sludge swinger that is as much a dancefloor banger as any of EyeHateGod’s crowd-pleasers. In fact, I went back to that infamous second track on Take As Needed For Pain for reference, to find that it’s much slower than I thought, at least with Blitz as a comparison. Mostly Potemkin steer closer to the bleaker side of the sound but make no mistake – they can groove.
I said with Sludge Vol. 1 that I’d be looking forward to more, and Potemkin have found the bile to cough up another four quick tracks in the same vein of brutal simplicity. Now if they’d only stop teasing and just come and play in the local shithole venue, we could do this right. And if you’ll excuse me, I now have a habit to attend to again… Where did I put that CD-R of Our Problem..?
Label: Independent
Band Links: Bandcamp
Scribed by: Harry Holmes
