Earlier this week, we suggested that you nod out to the power-pretty sounds of New Zealanders Jakob. Maybe you were into it. Maybe that wasn’t angry enough or sludgy enough or vocalized enough for you (there were, in fact, no vocals).
Fine. Let’s throw the malcontents a bone now with a full stream of the new album from California sludgesters Cold Blue Mountain. This set of five long songs, called Old Blood, is the band’s second full-length and blends expansive instrumental contemplation with Brandon Squyres’s acid-drenched screams for a journey through the story the band wanted to tell this time around. Says drummer Daniel Taylor:
“Lyrically, Old Blood tells a story. But musically it tells a story too. It tells the story of how we as a band took the different all the different styles we dabbled in on our first record – doom, sludge, post rock, fucked up ’90s grunge – and made them all gel into a cohesive, heavy melodic sound. The album is about a group of people whose homeland was taken over by an opposing force some years ago, and most of the inhabitants have just grown complacent with their lives under the rule of this foreign body. So much so to the point that they have almost forgotten who they were. I was doing a lot of research on cultural history mainly American Indians but I made the story and lyrics somewhat ambiguous so as to let people derive their own idea of settings and time frame. There’s a common theme throughout history of things expanding and taking over others and erasing almost all traces of the original inhabitants be it through military force or natural selection. Nothing wants to be forgotten and most things don’t have a choice, this story represents a select few who chose to try and take back what was rightfully theirs.”
The album drops from Halo of Flies Records next week (October 7), but you can hear it all right now at the Deciblog before you pre-order it here. Inject yourself with some Old Blood!
