While hardly mind blowing, Dark Castle (featuring drummer Rob Shaffer formerly of tech metalcore act Into the Moat) delivers ample moments of shoe-gazing, despondency and languid segues of dreamy, droning ambiance within the 8 surprisingly short songs (the longest is only a shade under 7 minutes) contained on this 37 minute long player.

All the elements are here in spades with the focus on plodding, depressive, dirges flocked with somber melodies lines and hollow angst filled shouts. Most of the tracks are satisfying in their mournful but sludgy delivery, but I have to say, other than the all too short “Grasping the Awe”, which delivers a stunning Samothrace-like (think “Awkward Hearts”) 4 and a half minutes of rending artistry and closer “A Depth Returns” with some haunting guitar lines, not too many of the other tracks really grabbed me. The title track is a short flamenco is number and “Weather the Storm” is a largely programmed instrumental interlude, so things are broken up a bit but for the most part, nothing else really breaks the mold of pulls me in.

Still, for fans of the bands mentioned, this might be worth a look as it does everything well enough, and i’ll certainly check the next release out, but right now they just just lack that extra element to raise their material to the next level.

Take Rwake as a very rough starting point, for a droning, post rock/doom mix but instead of twisted injections of blackened psychedelia, inject some fuzzed out stoner rock/doom, groaning sludge heft, some soulful solos and vocals and plenty of acoustic ambience and you have a record that drifts and rumbles with an artful, dreamy girth.

With 6 songs clocking in at about 47 minutes, there are no overly sprawling compositions, just 6 tracks of developed but not drawn out tracks of superior music that’s emotionally rending while retaining a sense of hazy but blustery despair. Opener “Into the Clearing” sets the tone for the rest of the album with a rending main riff and pained vocals from all of the members ranging from soulful croons, deep roars and feral screams-and therein lies much of the allure of Deadbird, as the vocal interplay is truly mesmerizing. Despite an earthy initial groove, the album’s longest cut, “Death of the Self” features a deeply introspective acoustic segue and crumbling climax that’s to die for. “Feral Flame” is the album’s, shortest, most direct track despite it’s scrawling, lumbering close out while “The Riverbed” is the album’s most lethargic, loping track with a Southern sense of drawl and groove amid the draining acoustics and crooning, making for a Down/Crowbar-ish hue to the earthy doom gait.

The title track closes things out with appropriate light/dark textures that mingle crumbling doom and delicate acoustics for an album closing that makes you exhale deeply once it’s all over. This is fantastic stuff from a band I only expect to get better and better with time

So yeah, if Mastodon were girthier, nastier and far far sludgier, you might get close to Black Cobra’s sound, a sound that crumbles and lopes but never veers into stoner doom territory instead being the crustier, bluesier, distant cousin of angular angry and atonal hardcore.

The Eight swift tracks (plus 3 CD-ROM videos) blow by in a blurry, stop start landslide of pussy riffs with the debris all ending up in the gutter (“Five Daggers”, “Below the Cusp”, “Red Tide”, “Swords for Teeth”). Then, as is par for the course in 2007/2008 there are the necessary injections of post rock ambience as heard on “The Sapphire Falcon”, “Thanos”, and standouts “Dragon and Phoenix” and “Ascension”.

While all tracks sneer and lumber with aplomb and fittingly gravelly vocals, none of it really turns me on despite its gnarly, antagonistic tones and more subtle atmospheric hues. Also, the whole affair is over in such blustery and brief 25 minutes or so, its like getting your first Blowjob-It was over before you knew it, and you are pretty sure you enjoyed it, but you were a little weak at the knees

The two lengthy tracks from Baroness will no doubt have some crossover appeal for fans of Electric Wizard, High on Fire, Sleep and Earthride, but also the crowd that enjoyed the latest Minsk or Rwake releases. The band manages to cleverly mix hazy, fuzzy stoner rock with a more teeth baring, virulent form of antagonistic yet expansive post rock especially on the killer second track, the 12+ minute, “Cavite”. I generally don’t enjoy genre of stoner/sludge, but Baroness with their gruffer, sterner take on the genre has indeed piqued my attention with these two stellar offerings that offer some form of intellect, aggression and development to the genre. I will definitely be picking up The Red Album when Relapse releases it later this summer.

As for Unpersons, their 4 shorter tracks are far more experimental yet rooted in traditional stoner/sludge metal. With Kylesa drummer Carl McGinley in their ranks, you can expect some furious drumming amid the off beat, angular, staggering, almost Mastodon-ish (and Kylesa) take on stoner rock. And while the music was acceptable in its often crazy structures and hazy hues, the vocals tend to put me off with their slightly spazzy delivery that verge on screamo/emo/nu grind quirkiness. Only more experimental lengthy last track “A Small Gesture, A Thousand Small Happy Gestures (Shone In The Dust)” held my attention. But still I don’t see Unpersons as an act I’ll be looking out for or waiting for future releases like Baroness.

Slow yet abrasive and menacing, Materia has all the hallmarks you’d expect from such a record; gritty earthy guitars, foreboding, patient pace, creepy atmospheres and gruff vocals. The wall of crumbling noise is a mix of crawling, loping tracks like “Cut a Hand”, “Masamune” and “Slaughterhouse” and more urgent landslide paced tracks like the introductory “Smile” or “Stigma” and even stoner rock/doom styled “Black Caped Man”. Either way, the generally shorter tracks (with the exception of 9 minute ambient/droning closer “Confutatis”), make for a relatively swift, yet caustic listen.

Still though, amid a sea of high end doom/sludge, material doesn’t do quite enough to elevate itself to a higher status and is missing that ‘wow’ factor to make it a bonafide heavy hitter in the genre.

At times lumbering and dense, and at times, sloth like and crawling with feedback, the almost instrumental Bestial staggers with bluesy heft and a hazy sneer veering from gnarly, angry metal (“One Nine”, “El Equis”, “Thrown From Great Heights”, ‘Omniscient” ) that has threads to the recent slew of noise like Lair of The Minotaur and The Abominable Iron Sloth, to loping, red eyed density (“El Duce de Octobre”, “Sombra De Bestia”, “Beneath” ) that comes across like Pelican on some sort of barbiturate fueled drinking and weed binge with High on Fire (“The Cry of Melora”). The infrequent screams of Landrian add some bite and keep things from being a purely instrumental act, but they don’t really complete the noisy package as I would have liked.

In all, yet another quality At A Loss Recordings effort that will make your ears bleed and your teeth gnash.

All in all, III is rattling and unsettling enough to appeal to most fans of really noisy fucked-up hardcore, though at times it seems like they are just being crazy for the sake of being crazy. When it works however its easy to get caught up and trapped in their relentless barrage of neurotic stimuli, and that which seems like a lack of tightness the first few spins, reveals itself as twisted logic after repeated listens.