This is the second album form French sludge metallers Fange.
I enjoyed the group’s debut EP Poisse, so it’s good to catch up with them once more for their second album.
This is pitch-black sludge ugliness, with some noise tendencies. Think Primitive Man, Full of Hell and Eyehategod all rolled into the grimiest, filthiest burrito that you can imagine and then stuffed down a diseased throat with the intensity of someone how hasn’t had a good meal in a very long time.
Full of rolling, crushing riffs, hardcore aggression and disgusting heaviness, Pourrissoir is the kind of dark sludge release that should be mandatory listening for anyone into nasty music.
At turns energetically brutal or lethargically lethal, Fange manage to pull off everything they do on this album with a kind of bleak, harrowing style.
One of the things I like about Fange is their ability to go from brutal raging to tense atmospherics at the drop of a hat. Which is linked to another thing I really like about them – this is not a one-dimensional crushfest at all. Hell, even if it was it would still be a top-notch album. However, their ability to inject more than just heavy riffs into their songs – atmosphere, mood, pacing, dynamics, nuance, even a drop of subtlety amidst the general carnage – it simply sets them apart from a lot of their sludge metal peers.
The singer’s plague-ridden voice sounds quite inhuman most of the time. I dread to think how he makes some of the noises that he does without rupturing or injuring something permanently.
On Pourrissoir Fange have demonstrated that they’re quite simply one of the best bands in the sludge metal game at the moment. Avoid this at your own peril.
Wonderbox Metal 