So, you love sludge, and also love cult sci-fi and horror, so what do you do? Well, if you’re natives of Wellington, the answer would be to form a band and crank out an album that hits with all the impact of a lead pipe to the cranium! So, strap in, brace your ears, and prepare to be battered by Planet of the Dead’s new album ‘Pilgrims’.

In a timely fashion that lands it in the year when the new cinematic adaptation of Dune finally hits the big screen, ‘Gom Jabbar’ opens the sonic assault on the senses, with vocalist Mark Mundell alternately mangling his vocal chords with a growl worthy of Kirk Windstein and otherworldly snarls in keeping with the theme of the song. In contrast to the opening heavy slog, the opening lines of ‘Pilgrim’ has a catchy bounce, combining a sense of both the fun and serious, a dichotomy shared by the source book and subsequent film adaptation ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’. The pure heavy returns care of ‘Nostromo’, and trust me when I say it is so much better than anything that has been added to the Alien universe for many years, managing to cram into four minute and twelve seconds a greater sense of terror and doom than Ridley Scott managed in the flabby and turgid messes that were ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Covenant’. Trust me, I’d rather listen to this track any day of the week rather than subject myself to those cinematic misfires.

‘The Sprawl’ slows the pace to a trippy meander, albeit this is the sort of trip that would have you crouched in a corner and swearing “never again!” Even the rather skilful solo of guitarist Malcolm McKenzie creeps around the edge of the discordant, never quite crossing the line, but always jarring against the senses. This encounter with the brown acid is hardly soothed the band following it with the unmistakeable opening bars of the ‘Halloween’ theme, ‘Escape From Smith’s Grove’ lumbering unstoppably forward like Michael Myers intent on murder. ‘Directive IV’ follows, the lyrics being a series of iconic quotes from excellent ‘Robocop’, whilst the music takes on a suitably industrial sound, the rhythm section of Messrs Harris and Hengst landing each note with a machine-like precision. By comparison the beats of ‘The Cursed Earth’ are almost tribal and primitive, encapsulating the savagery of the degenerated denizens of that wasteland outside the bounds of 2000AD’s Megacities, folks who are literally beyond the pale. The album is then closed off by ‘The Great Wave’ in an epic fashion, a track that like the ocean ebbs and flows between slow and crushing waves of sound and galloping tsunamis of riffs.

Having recently been inundated by an avalanche of music hailing from Sweden, it is good to know that those Vikings of yore do not hold the monopoly on great new music, and these four New Zealanders can be rightfully proud of ‘Pilgrims’. If you sit in that intersection of the Ven diagram between lovers of stoner, doom, and sludge, and lovers of sci-fi and horror, this is a must to add to your collection.

(8/10 Spenny) 

https://www.facebook.com/planetofthedeadband

https://planetofthedead.bandcamp.com/album/pilgrims