Two years after breaking through with Furnace, Brooklyn's finest, Batillus, are back with Concrete Sustain, a collection of six fairly lengthy but surprisingly lean and focused updates on the band's industrial sludge repertoire. Representing more of a refinement of the existing Batillus sound rather than an evolution per se, Concrete Sustain dials back the atmospherics just a smidge without sacrificing any of the bottom end. Heavy is and always will be the Batillus stock-in-trade.
"Concrete" is hands down the band's catchiest song to date, which hardly makes it a radio friendly unit shifter but if you can get that damned chorus out of your head you're a more disciplined man than I. Kind of hard to describe, like a hardcore band recording a Fear Factory song for Earache. This being the Web 2.0 era I normally eschew such indirect comparisons – which the artists universally fucking hate – in favor of a more visceral Youtube immersion, but non-live clips of this album's tracks are distressingly difficult to find at this point. Get with it, Seventh Rule, I'm trying to pimp your merch here.
"Beset" (live version below) is probably the most "vintage" tune here, eight minutes of unexpurgated post-metal squall casually punctuated with scowling proclamations of grimy sludge hate. "Rust" is the only overtly industrial-themed track on the album, and though it offers a little spice-of-variety to an album already chock full of such, it also serves as a reminder that the rest of the songs work just as well without any electronic ornamentation. This is a group that has outgrown anything so forced as inter-genre alchemy experiments.
While Concrete Sustain would be highly recommended for the track "Concrete" alone, this is really must own material as a whole for anyone whose tastes straddle those oft-blurred lines between sludge, doom and post-whatever. The fact that the band tour like madmen and are probably soundchecking in your local dive bar's basement as you read this only serves to make them all the more inescapable. 2013 is the year of Batillus.
9/10
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