Sadhus “The Smoking Community” – Big Fish (Review)

This is the second album from Sadhus “The Smoking Community”, a sludge metal band from Greece.

After enjoying their 2016 split with Agnes Vein, this is my first chance to get to grips with a Sadhus “The Smoking Community” full length album. Big Fish gives us 34 minutes of smoky heaviness and savage stoner doom sludge.

Treading similar ground as bands such as Eyehategod, Dopethrone, and Iron Monkey, Big Fish delivers big riffs, big distortion, and big songs. The band’s sludgy doom, (doomy sludge?), is harsh and almost unrelenting. Rawness and heaviness seem baked into the band’s DNA, although lighter sections do appear here and there.

The songs are well-written and offer the kind of music that may be familiar, but are wrapped up in the band’s own take on hateful sludge. It’s a formula that works far more than it doesn’t.

The singer’s voice is scathing and throat-scraping-raw. He screams and shrieks with the best of them on this album.

With a mix of paces and energies, these songs are drenched in Southern swamp vibes the likes of which Eyehategod put on the map, regardless of the fact that this has originated somewhere else entirely. This kind of dirty, down tuned sludge recognises no borders, it seems.

A quality release, that’s for sure. Highly recommended.