Review by Ben for Primitive Man - Insurmountable (2022)

I must admit that I've generally stayed away from sludge metal over the years. I think it's more out of confusion as to what it actually is than anything else, but since my commitment to listening to more modern metal releases at the back end of last year, I've found a few sludge / doom releases hitting my playlist. Primitive Man's Insurmountable EP and the Mizmor & Thou collaboration full length have me wondering whether I've been missing out on a heap of music that's actually very much to my tastes. They may not have cleared up any of the confusion (isn't this just abrasive death doom?), but I'll save that debate for the forums.

This EP is close to 40 minutes in length, so I'm not surprised to see it listed as a full length on a few other sources. Regardless, what we have here is for the most part crushing, feedback soaked, doom metal, with massive drums and powerful growled vocals. The atmosphere is intense and dark, just the way I like it, and while the main approach is on the slower side, things ramp up towards death metal on a couple of occasions. Opening track This Life is definitely the main event, being a 12 minute shifting mass which would be a perfect display piece in the museum of heaviest fucking things that ever existed (yes I'm sure this museum exists somewhere in the universe). If the whole EP was this good, Insurmountable might have lived up to its name, but that's unfortunately not the case. The second track, Boiled, is a 7 minute noise piece, which might appeal to some, but doesn't connect with me at all,  while final track Quiet has the unique quality of being a Smashing Pumpkins cover, but only results in the weakest of the metal tracks on offer. Thankfully the two best tracks make up the vast majority of the running time, leaving me with positive feelings and an inability to give this anything lower than 4 stars.