The ripping, tearing tones and over the top riffing n’ screams of kick-off jam, “Quietus” is a fully loaded blast of audio shotgun shells straight to the spinal column.  Twin guitars dish out thrash-y, slow motion death rattles on one hand and scraggly noise signatures on the other while the drumming possesses enough power to crack railroad ties in half with a flick of its pinky finger.  Bass lines thicker and heavier than Satan’s thigh bone keep the chording simple; wrapping around the nihilistic anti-grooves with a suffocating squeeze that never allows for a moment’s breath.  From start to finish the concrete thick density never lets up as Gale treats every passage like a climax, with deafening impact achieved throughout each well-measured riff and bottomless vibration.  Detuned downer sludge, with some catchier elements and blistering post-punk melodicism, oozes from the open wound abandon of “We could have been gods” and its jagged, brute force, plate tectonic movements.  Saliva drips n’ sprays from the violent higher-pitched screams and mid-range roars as the Staph-infected distortion chews and gnaws its way to a rippling, watery, surprisingly musical infection that takes a second to indulge in some clean Floyidian psychedelic meditation.  Enjoy the spaciousness because the grimy walls close in and crush your head when the sludge gavel drops for a final sentence of life in prison riffage during the song’s tense finish.

Cities fall into sinkholes on the canyon creating quake of “The Great Gorge,” perhaps my favorite track on the release.  Booming toms lead in a druggy death march of hazy, phase-y free-form chord repetitions.  Harmonized, Eastern-tinged drudges give way to capsized open melodies whose vague prettiness is a biting juxtaposition to the criminally heavy rhythmic dirges and heathen verbal abuse.  Scab tickling minor key guitar work provides some tonal differentiation from all of the low slung, bottom-leaned bludgeon with a few of the licks having this warped, 70s prog sound pouring out of their demented demeanors.  The lavish, quick-handed tom/snare fill whooshes and slappin’ cymbal sprinkles bolster the track and its doom groovin’, dual guitar interplay into the next stratosphere for a song that truly ends with a bang.   At 3:41 in length the confrontational attitude and pushy sludge eruptions of the volcanic “Of Growth & Insignificance” conjure up one of the album’s most straightforward rumblers.  The riffing never goes full on Sabbath but couples the brass-knuckle, punk sludge battery of bands like 16 and Ringwurm’s Domesticate It to the girders of the as far as the eye can see ethereal doom expansion of YOB and Deadbird.

It’s on “Kingdom Come” that Gale finally says fuck the cosmos and go off into the kind of big, blues-burnt riffs and Sabbathisms that can be identified as pure sludge/doom and nothing else.  There’s still some inventive intertwining of the crystalline twin guitars that adds progressive, spacey flair to the mostly human slaying, swine slopping power chords, vile and sometimes doubled-up vocal carnage and putrid rhythmic toxicity.  An extensive, droning solo trades in complexity for pared down melody in the song’s second half with some undistorted guitar/bass melodies adding further little tricks and offshoots to the band’s unique desert half pipe.  The rolling snare entrance and gleaming, nearly King Crimson/Rush toned guitars that entrance “Harvest” conjure a 70s thinking cap journey that’s paint-peeled into oblivion when burly, roid-pumped riffs and whale munching vocal hollers bring the heaviness and nothing but.  Trembling, paranoia-packed, blackened noise guitar interludes and gracious melodic trip-outs interject musicality and variety into the outfit’s frequent brushes with death’s finality in this tune, as the band ups the acerbic fury on their way to a lengthy instrumental/outro jamfest that head nods its way into the sun via a hypnotic riff/rhythm shakedown that rides all the way past Hell’s horizon line.

It’s a shame Gale are calling it quits with this album but they say if you’re going to go out with one last statement, make it a masterpiece.  This Self-Titled is truly a modern sludge masterpiece that manages to merge the genre’s necessary filth with more tuneful aspects while somehow avoiding the sometimes cheesy, same-y “We all sound exactly like Baroness/Mastodon” sludge/prog traits of every similar minded band since the aforementioned pair’s respective inceptions.  I actually don’t dislike either band but if you’re going to call yourself a sludge band, go for the fuckin’ gusto somewhere at least.  I’m thoroughly fucking thrilled with this record and I think fans of early Neurosis, Rwake, Deadbird, YOB, Brainoil, Samothrace, Asunder, The Iron Tongue, Shitfire and Black Hell’s Deformers of the Universe will get more than their money’s worth here.

“To be Free” kicks off with quiet, ascendant chords obviously transcendentally setting the scene for the torture session to come.  Every strum of the guitar sounds more harried and Helter Skelter than the last, until feedback signifies the entrance of drummer Marcus’ wall of fill-intensive beats that relish a combat-ready, tribal drum flair exploding into crashing fills of snare/tom surgery.  When the dual guitar dissonance lifts just enough for one to catch a breath, the doubled-up doom riffs of Brandon and Wilson either go on a full on battle rampage stomp to see how many skulls they can collect before sinking into melodic doom riffing with surprisingly strong clean vocals engaged in a life or death duel with the eviscerated screams.  Forget about Mastodon…this is the real deal here…it’s got the melody, the tectonic riffs and acidic scald to make sure you won’t forget a damn thing after the torture is over.

Introducing itself with depth-charging bass plunges from Nick, it isn’t long before “The Counseled” takes to the sky on wounded wings with riff after mountain scaling riff of head-nodding sludge/doom played a great deal faster than most doom dealers are willing to take a chance on.  As each player joins in on the vocals, there is a Phil Spector like wall of screaming built from the very get go and tangible grooves often dissipate into menacing phantoms of house haunting noise guitar.  This song eventually settles into one of the biggest, balliest Sabbath grooves on the album; a real half-speed hallucination fest topped off to perfection thanks to eerie guitar leads that seem like their sole purpose is to lose the psyche in the pits of Hell itself.  Just when you think the song is over in a cum-bath of squealing feedback, Gale launches into one of the doomiest, skullduggin’ thrash riffs you’ll hear on the entire EP.

Blackened, Norwegian atmosphere creeps into the American Midwest on the opening, atonal peel n’ scrape chords of “To Build a Fire.”  It’s that haunting heathen worship that the underrated Slave Traitor often toyed with.  The build-up here is a lengthy one; the bubbling, acid-blasted tom drums creating a melody to follow underneath the formless, Northern Lights’ born guitar noise until midway through Gale unleashes a riff that could swallow centuries in a single gulp.  They continue to flirt with the acerbic, frost-bitten darkness but launch the guitar work like SCUD missiles one last time into that unholy doom groove that was teased at earlier.  For an instrumental it sure knows how to keep the attention span on high throughout.

Opening up with a soft, urgent strum “Unsung” plays it clean and melodic for several measures, allowing mood to take precedence over immediate heaviness.  This ideal does not last long as the band sees fit to nuke it to pieces with a wall of screechy, scream-y dual guitar work that begins as post-rock bliss, yet shows its true face in the mirror thanks to a doom riff so decisive it’ll cut your throat with a rusty barbed-wire fence.  They keep their passages moving from pseudo-black metal melody to forceful, knife-at-the-throat catchy doom grooves which gravitate far above traditional Sabbath flair.  Marcus even reaches a point of blast beat fury, paving the way for the song to go back into its descending, decimating downward pointed melody that thankfully brings that noxious groove back to the forefront one last time.

Closer “Burn your Person” sacrifices none of the complexity heard on the rest of the EP as it careens like a comet into the Atlantic with one fallen star, thunder blasted doom riff after another.  Don’t think Gale will make your time an easy one, because they blast, toy with anti-melody and just general “fuck you’s” throughout, but there is a coherent return to riff-y sludge throughout this track with some exceptionally drugged-out, melancholic lead work incorporated in all of the right places.

Although I made some comparisons to Gale’s sound earlier in this review, the more I play this record, the more I find it hard to pin this quartet down to any one particular sound.  They are fuckin’ sludgy as a landfill, make no mistake about it but there are an unheralded amount of influences at work here, giving Gale a sound that I can’t directly liken to anyone else.  If you are looking for original sludge/doom in 2015, your prayers have been answered!