REVIEW: DESTROY JUDAS 'WAKE' (SELF-RELEASED)

Genre super-classification upsets musicians because it somehow reduces their art to a set of simplistic building blocks, and that's not always unjust, it often is constructed out of a set of simplistic building blocks and they'd rather you thought of it as the magical end result of three months mediating under a waterfall. Destroy Judas' 2011 EP 'Wake' (stream below or name-your-price download) is template atmospheric crust in very much the same way that Star Wars is a film about space wizards - it blatantly is, but people who like it would rather over-romanticise it as a hand-woven miracle, than something that came from a press-out sprue kit.

Covering similar territory to Morne, Fall Of Efrafa and all those other heavy-lidded bands lurking in that poorly lit Neurosian nexus where sludge, crust, post-metal, doom and lapping tides of bongwater meet, playing off their perfectly construct ambiguity that lends them no ambiguity at all. There're tribal drum fills, dense and ponderous slowbuilds, crashing riff waves, and euphoric eruptions like breaking through the layer of stormclouds to stand, breathless in the cold sunlight at the top of Mount Doompatch Postcrust, and other obvious elemental metaphors. Made up of veterans of such intimidating OC outfits as Phobia, Asunder, Lachrymose, Crisis and others no sane man has the time or patience to list, it's fair to say that their collective skill, experience and sheer passion for playing music with a track record of being its own reward, transforms something that'd be profoundly dull in other hands, into something heartaching, earnest and downright amazing.

Like Star Wars, it's perfectly possible for something to be contrived and really, really good.