Phlefonyaar pronounced “flef-on-yar , are a two piece blues doom sludge combo from your worst dreams and your most exciting nightmares. I don’t know where in the UK these guys are from but I think they were deposited from their mother’s wretched wombs in the wrong place. These guys should be in NOLA somewhere , weighing corpses down with rock filled moonshine barrels.  This is the bands second album….. they formed in 1996. It worries me what they were doing in the meantime. Police forces should check their cold case lists.

In all honesty the album title offers a description of the tracks on offer here in a much better and more succinct fashion that I am about to attempt but the Editor of Ave Noctum will get on at me if I leave it at that.

Paul March and Jim Males who make up the band offer a sinister blues soaked album filled with fuzzed up doom.  This is life in a back woods meth lab. Like Evil Dead without the Deadites. Crushing riffs a la Crowbar with the menace of EHG and the cocksure swagger of the Firefly clan. This album oozes attitude whilst not giving a fuck in the slightest.

There are thunderous tracks on this hear album. How can two people make the glorious bludgeon that it “You Can Never Have (Too Many Knives). Crushing Doom riffs backed by brutal drums and the tortured yells of a hillbilly serial killer. This must be what my head sounds like when the pills don’t work!  I am getting ahead of myself as the aforementioned track is the penultimate one on offer. From the opening blues riff backed spoken passage “The Lingering Molly” that opens “Septic, Bitter and Hardbitten” it is obvious that Phlefonyaar plan on taking us down the garden path , in a sack , whilst carrying a spade and quicklime. “Temple Bells After Midnight” begins with one of those riffs that bounces from your chest to your bowels then forces your head down to meet it . In the back a menacing industrial thud keeps beat. It sounds like the metal door of a furnace being slammed shut before the match is tossed inside.  “And if My Conscience Be in Fits” is metal as hypnosis , the riff dragging me away from reality whilst the drums flail and crash like Bonham. This is pure organic metal, free range and covered in moss and maggots, bursting with life but embracing decay.

“Slow Death and Procrastination” is a Ronseal track. Never has indecisiveness sounded so epic though and calling the next track “Nuthin’ But Whimsy” surely breaches the trades description act. It is pure unadulterated Doom Sludge with the gloves off.

“Follow the Scent of Woes” ends this collection. It starts with an ethereal yet menacing clip from The Island of Doctor Moreau and then deposits more delicious elephantine riffs and drum beats which pile on life wet clay in a plague pit.

Phelfonyaar have created a masterpiece in heaviosity. A sweating, breathing lumbering beast of an album that demands to be heard and crushes resistance.  Simply awesome.

(9/10 Matt Mason)  

https://www.facebook.com/Phlefonyaar

https://phlefonyaar.bandcamp.com