Every now and again I veer towards the whole stoner metal scene and usually towards what I think of as its purist form. I sit down with an album by bands like Dopethrone or Weedeater and think that I really could get into this stuff. Then I start to think how much better it would be if I was listening to this on a carefree Saturday afternoon with four very large speakers, an amplifier designed to blow holes in walls and a bucket full of, well, you get my drift… For me the whole genre is so inextricably linked to chugging on a fat one. So much so, it’s difficult not to listen to it and think how much better it would be if you were, er, stoned. So I need a little more than battering ram bass, riffs the size of a planet and vocals that sound like the intoxicated union of Ozzy Osbourne and a piece of extra coarse sandpaper both fed through the oxygen filtering system in my goldfish’s bowl. Step forward Boar who, apart from providing any reviewer who takes against them a target the size of a slow-moving elephant by calling themselves ‘Boar’, have produced something that is both as refreshing agile as a Rhino pup and, for the genre, stylistically fairly adventurous.
Let’s get one thing straight, Veneficae may have all the stoner sensibilities of a band like Kyuss but this is a heavy slab of metal that will more likely appeal to fans of Dopethrone, Weedeater and Horn of the Rhino fans. It’s heavy. But it manages to stop itself sliding down that slippery slope of just becoming as titanically heavy, dark and sludgy as those aforementioned bands. Boar opt instead for more of a doom tip with those giant riffs providing a nice orbit for the spiralling arrangements and not losing sight of the fact that it’s sometimes good to have a tune or two in those songs rather than just slipping into distorted chord progressions so heavy you feel like you need to sit down and take a breath. Veneficae displays a more light footed versatility than that. They can take you on a rambling trip – the crashing stoner rock meets stoner metal on the first track Old Grey being a fantastic example of that. Like a mix of Dozer meets High On Fire, it’s a fine start. Then things slip into another gear with the Electric Wizard-style Witch Woman which you could, quite frankly, have told me was made in 1972 if it wasn’t for the solid wall production and the perfectly balanced guitar sounds.
The album then takes you on a varied journey with a fistful of tracks weighing in a six to nine minutes that deliver pretty much what you might expect from a band dabbling with these kind of genres and the styles of the aforementioned bands and a few more too boot. Third track Sand begins with a nice chugging riff before settling into something that could almost have come out of Manchester in the early 90s. The title track is a fearsome, tumbling Matt Pike style riff before the trippy 1970s doom of Tree which then drifts into the heavy, sludgy head-bang of final track Wolf Lord.
There’s often a funky, slightly restless edge to Boar that stops it from falling into that linear trap that, for me anyway, a lot of stoner bands seem to fall into. I realise that heavy repetition is often the point with these things, but Boar manage to maintain a constant vein of unpredictability and versatility that makes it an album worth sitting down with. In short, a nice mix of stoner, doom and sludge metal. A metaphorical ton of bricks complete with distorted rasping vocals and like a heady mix of Electric Wizard, the spiral hooks of High on Fire with a bit of the sludgy intrigue and aggression of Crowbar thrown in every now for good measure. A decent first strike and worth a look for fans of all of the above even if this might not be the album that wins fans over from outside the billowing clouds of smoke.
(7/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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