I have never heard of this three piece from Rotherham before, but I have now and I am fucking glad I have. Not only is this a fortifying ladleful of grim UK doom/sludge, but Swamp Coffin is also a fucking great band name and suitably reflective of what this 4-song debut EP has to offer. Formed from the ashes of personal tragedy and horrendous misfortune, you can literally hear the bile and visceral misery pour in slick waves of unctuous tar like sludge, pouring into your ears like an infernal parasite that’s set to lay it’s putrid spawn in your brain and smiles whilst its offspring eats it’s way out of your napper. Might sound like hyperbole but you can fuck off right now. This is a collection of edifyingly disgusting pots of grief gruel that you’ll lap up like newborn puppies whose mum has just been run over and you haven’t eaten for 3 days.
‘Blood In The Water’ kicks things off as Swamp Coffin mean to go on. Imagine the unholy combination of early Doom, Iron Monkey and first album Raging Speedhorn and your nowhere near how good this is and how densely unsettles it makes you feel. The guitar is wielded like an industrial wrecking ball, with no thought of the consequences of its actions, it’s ten tons of monstrous energy and hate. It’s like a wall of concrete that although it takes its marching orders from the Black Sabbath school of doom, manages to finagle its way to something completely new as the bass and drums syncopate in a march to the death. There’s nothing complicated here, it’s about getting the hate down on tape and wrapping it around your consciousness and suffocating you like an invisible boa constrictor whilst smiling as you gasp your last breath.
Onto the vocals and Jon Rhodes literally opens his soul here and pours out his pain and misery in a wail of desperate cries and bile inflected hate. It’s quite the performance and I can only wonder how this plays out live. The lyrical style treads an almost death metal path at times with brief respite afforded in having occasional spoken word delivery that’s unique and deserves your attention. The comedically titled last track ‘Last Of The Summer Slime’ belies the evil on show here and creeps out of the speakers to end 34 minutes of deeply upsetting, joyfully morose and dark, dank slices of life liver into a soup of primordial sludge metal that is one of the best things I have heard this year. Not only can these boys play, but they have an ear for a tune and have backed this up with a production that is as huge as anything you’d hear on a major label release and probably cost a fraction. For that, Swamp Coffin should be applauded from the rooftops. Go see them when they next play, buy this album and get the t-shirt (or make your own). This is simply magnificently damaged stuff.
(9.9/10 Nick Griffiths)
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