Californian sludge/doom metallers 16 return with this their ninth album, following 2020’s ‘Dream Squasher’ album which was a hugely enjoyable collection of hoary, doomy, sludgy filth not unlike the stuff that collects in between your toes after a ten-mile run or around your mouth after eating seven scotch eggs with nine glasses of Merlot. It was a brutalising and hugely enjoyable collection of groove laden carnage, but much has changed in the 16 camp since those halcyon days, losing their vocalist (alongside a cavalcade of rotating members throughout their inception in 1992), which has seen guitarist Bobby Ferry assuming vocal duties on this their new album ‘Into Dust’. This sort of seismic change can on the face of it, cripple, hobble, and permanently damage bands, as they struggle to recreate the lightning in the bottle of previous efforts. The question then is, have 16 managed to keep their standards at that high bar they have set for themsleves? The answer to that particular question is a resounding yes.
Listening to this album, I have a distinct feeling of discombobulation, of time travel, of sand shifting from beneath me. Like a latter-day Marty McFly without his Doc Brown, I feel myself being sucked back in time to a better, less confusing, and volatile world. When things were simpler, more straight forward and yes, I’ll say it…better. I’m not sure when and where I am but it feels like sometime in 1994 when the likes of Pantera, Machine Head and Sepultura were smashing up the charts, all down tuned and cast-iron heavy riffs, with a swagger, a groove, a swing with vocals spewed from the very bowels of hell or carried along on an angel’s wings. It was also a time for the heavier end of grunge/rock with the blistered, swooning, groaning and sweaty guitars of Alice In Chains, White Zombie and Soundgarden, as they did their level best to grind the world into a pink paste. Climbing out of my metaphorical DeLorean for a moment and back to 16, because this is the reason for my time travelling indulgent prose as this collection of songs that represents ‘Into Dust’ seems to channel all the very best things that this genre has to offer.
Every song on here, gently glides, grinds, slams and stomps its way through your face and into your guts. It has elements of Clutch, Pantera, Norma Jean and Chimera (especially on the vocals) and of course those perennial doom genre touchpoints Sabbath and the UK’s own Cathedral. What is different here is the vocals which although have a lovely growl and sandpaper quality on occasion, there is a haunting, melodic quality to Ferry’s approach, which elevates this album above being merely a genre staple, to something more immediate and engaging. It’s for want of a better comparison, like Mastodon without the bells and whistles playing Stone Temple Pilot and Devildriver covers at half speed. None more so than on ‘Dirt In My Mouth’ which grinds and bucks like a rodeo clown being trampled by an angry bull. It’s all well-crafted, changes pace/tempo at the drop of a hat whilst being unpinned by a sledgehammer heavy riff that pivots on a delicate guitar solo before segueing back into a slippery, bastard strength territory, before running off like a scolded dog into the desert to die.
This review may be veering off into the realms of hyperbole, but critics be dammed. It’s not often you come across a band that seems to take all the elements of bands that are dear to my heart. Look, this album isn’t perfect, but it does feel as though it was gestated within a period of my life that exists in sepia within my fading memory, that conjures the warm and the cosy. ‘Into Dust’ as a collection of songs, straddles several genres and is a well-played and warmly produced effort, that I would be happy to bang my head to in a metal club, tap my foot to watching them play or play air guitar to on a walk in the woods. It may not reinvent the wheel in terms of its musical DNA and yes it may beg, borrow, and steal from the great and the good of the metal world, but it’s unapologetic and you know what, life is too short to sit here debating the whys and the wherefores, better to sit (or stand) and allow yourself to luxuriate in the familiar, the heavy and enjoy. I’ll even excuse the dinner jazz, saxophone infused intro to ‘Born on A Bar Stool’ (that’s a great song title right there) as it segues into an empire destroying, crunchy fucker of a riff that just about gets this song out of a ten-year sentence in the jail of the pretentious.
(8/10 Nick Griffiths)
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