Listening to Primitive Man is akin to getting your ass kicked in a dark alley by a bunch of beefy dudes with big fists and steel-toed boots, then getting tied to the back end of a muscle car and dragged across broken glass, face-first. They are unrelenting and brutal, a slow-motion cascade of riffs and bludgeoning Sludge/Doom that is as merciless as it is caustic. Just this week they have released a new record named Immersion, and within its grooves you will find all the death and misanthropy your black little heart can handle.
“The Lifer” opens the album with feedback, crunching, agonizingly slow guitar riffs, and that guttural grunt they call vocals. It slumps along, all dark and nasty and full of maggots, abrasive and crushing. “Entity” follows and it might somehow be even slower, a drone at the beginning that sounds sort of like being trapped in an aluminum tube with dozens of buzzing bees, the echoing feeding in on itself to drive you absolutely mad. There’s about two minutes of this before the drums and vocals decide to make a very sludgy appearance, everything about this song blurred and drugged out. “Menacing,” the longest song on this record, starts with a blastbeat and feels pretty Punkish, before hitting the brakes and doing that thing in your nightmares, where the monster is chasing you and you’re running as fast as you can but dammit you’re not moving anywhere, and the creature is catching up. The speed returns and then we hit this slow-groove grind that’s almost uplifting in its darkness. Eight minutes of drunken staggering and the song ends and you thank the gods because that’s it, you’ve reached your limit. Only the album isn’t over yet. “∞” is next and it’s nothing more than some scraping industrial, instrumental atmosphere to bridge you on over to “Foul,” the next to last song on this diatribe of destruction. Immediately you’re immersed (get it) in slow riffs, these more metallic than sludge at this point, the song doing that stagger-stomp these guys are so good at executing, heavy and slow and unrelenting. “Consumption” closes things out, just in time, because surely at this point your sanity is in question. So much darkness, so much pain, so much lust for a deliverance that is never coming. This one picks up the pace a bit, feels a little brighter, but that might all be an illusion. This might just be the light at the end of the tunnel because it’s the last track, but I have to say it felt a little peppier, if such a thing is possible. Hope, then, and a final goodbye.
This three-piece from Denver really know how to drown you in riffs and feedback and thundering drums and gut-churning vocals. Immersion is their third full-length album (they have a ton of splits with other bands) and there is maturation here, the songs feeling less youthful in their depravity and more slumped caveman. These guys are turning into bitter middle-aged men, and that’s great for their sound and their ethic. Can’t wait to see where they go from here.
Three Buckets of Blood out of Four
Kelly is the author of dozens of stories and dozens of reviews. He likes to write, he likes to read, he likes going to the movies, and he loves to laugh. He hails from the wilds of Kentucky and if you'd like to see more of his work, check out his website: www.kellymhudson.comor on Amazon