Like the tentacled leviathan depicted on their debut mini-album's front cover, the music created by Atlanta, GA's Zoroaster rises up from unfathomable depths, propelled by tsunamis of doom, submerged in viscous sludge. Behold cyclopean concoctions such as "Mons Venus" and "Defile," which steadily castigate the senses with well-varied bouts of grinding dirges and hypnotic grooves, their often cyclical strumming through slothful power chords appearing so simple, yet also proving so devastating. By comparison, the insistently pounding advance of "Bullwhip" may as well be thrash metal — recalling sludge kings Eyehategod as much as the other tracks do extreme doomsters like Sleep and Unearthly Trance. The disc's lone disappointment therefore has to be the malformed "Honey and Salt," which amounts to little more than one monotonous riff sequence repeated ad nauseam for almost eight minutes, and which no bong of this earth — not even those wielded by master weedians Bongzilla — could possibly salvage. Finally, there's the matter of Zoroaster's coarse, unintelligible, and virtually buried growls and screams throughout, which, though they serve the music's uncompromising philosophies perfectly well, virtually consign the group's career to muso-cult status. Surely both band and fans wouldn't want it any other way. - AMG

1. Mons Venus
2. Bullwhip
3. Honey And Salt
4. Defile
5. Heavy Heart