3 out of 5

Label: Hex Records, Export Work Record, The Ghost is Clear Records

Produced by: Justin Day

This rocks so good, and buzzes an I-now-realize conspicuously dormant bell in the back of my brain that was thirsting for a brand of 90s sludge metal that just went hard. There was a lot of that stuff at that time, of course, but not a lot that “lasted” well: that sounds / hits the same when we’re no longer a teen. Or maybe you have a band like Helmet, whose early / mid-era work still has bite, but is hard to parse alongside newer and later efforts, watering the overall discography down.

So Knub took it upon themselves to run with the Helmet torch – and bands of that ilk – and asks us: what if those acts continued to just rock the heck out, and kept evolving their sound as bands that were influenced by it made similar bids for the throne?

I think it would absolutely sound like about 20% of Crub. And probably the other 80% as well, but herein lies my main, unfortunate issue with this album: it is primarily one thing, over and over. Some drum fills and clean vocals help to break things up; Dave Ort’s lyrics have wisdom-of-the-common-man appeal, making picking out words and phrases (and reading along with the lyrics!) feel worthwhile. But Justin Day’s recording and mix is all volume (though balanced well), and once the group hits the gas at the outset, there are very few moments that let up. Normally a short runtime, which the album has, is a good fix for sound overload, but then Knub needs some additional hooks beyond “loud.” The choruses are solid, but rarely leaned into enough to make these memorable shoutalongs; it’s moreso just part of that Helmet thing, of hitting some sung notes before slamming back into the riff. The difference there is that Helmet often had at least a half album’s worth of earworms; a sense of pop backing their metal that really made things stick. In lieu of that, you can have some other kind of noteworthy factor – a weird voice; amazing chops – but the tracks on this album end up swinging about down the middle. Not to say that Knub is without chops, but the focus here is put on slamming you with volume, minimizing the opportunity to do much else.

As all of this sounds negatively critical, I do want to circle back up to the top: this rocks so damn good. A lot of bands that tried this thing, or have taken it in a different direction, can either be a bit cringe – like, I hear some Revolution Smile in here, or some 90s grungsters at their heaviest – or maybe lean too much into genre: the harmonies and crunch here could pass as Gojira, for example, but Knub always curbs things back towards a central riff.

It’s worth noting that this was, initially, intended as two EPs which were subsequently stuck together, and that makes a lot of sense. Packaged in a smaller size, it’d be easier to appreciate some of the nuance that definitely is here, and maybe my criticism then would just be warning about potential repetition on a full length… But that also makes the wax version of this the preferred listen, as there’s a bit of natural fuzz added to the VOLUME which makes it a tad less assaultive versus the digital, and the physical break of flipping the record adds in a nice breather.