Roachpowder

Viejo Diablo (TMC)
by Martin Popoff

Probably the best of this quickly crowding corner of metal (now just called stoner rock after linguistic games with retro, doom, and psychedelic metal), Roachpowder are a Swedish thing, fronted by a Canadian, but pertinently produced by Entombed twiddler Tomas Skogsberg. So there’s a Mudhoneyed production grime, which coupled with the band’s songwriting depth and Corrosion of Conformity jones (check out tourism booster New Orleans), make for one full-up, bubble-blister-boiled piece of deftly unprecise drone metal. Francisco Rencoret’s got the presence of Hetfield, the blues of Pepper, and the evil forboding of Wyndorf, so he quite capably drags the mucked mess along, a crash of sorts that includes all the sound-bitten touchstones of psychedelic, Sabbath, and grunge: three decades of pharmaceutical fuzziness. A rare tab that crosses the stoner rock line from theoretically cool (easy) to entertaining (hard).
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