The second full length of the Polish 71TonMan is one of those works whose heaviness could make the floor on which the cabinet with the stereo and speakers is resting collapse. After all, the band from Wroclaw keeps faith with its moniker, so these 71 tons of sludge doom pour like a waterfall of mud on the listener, burying him for good with dense riffs and slowed down as expected. It’s not only pachydermic the sound of ours, however: although a certain obsessiveness is at the base of the proposal, undertrack there are hidden lines that give a precise definition to the different songs, even if the auditory resistance is put to the test by this scarce hour of sludge author. Put like this, it could seem to someone that Earthwreck is essentially a succession of riffs without art or part: instead here there is musical art to spare, because it is not trivial to coincide an unstoppable firepower to a (always relative, of course) usability of the fund. Clearly not recommended to those who are looking for embroidery and assorted fawning in music, this monolith signed 71TonMan as far as I’m concerned is exactly what I would always like to hear from a sludge band: strength, compactness and clear ideas, which allow you to place, after nearly twenty minutes of bludgeons inflicted without interruption, an airy guitar solo, or go to touch the funeral in the second part of songs like Phobia and Torment, without everything going to mitigate or override the sense of an impact of rare effectiveness. Earthwreck is very close to a hypothetical state of the art of sludge, in its side closer to death doom and funeral rather than stoner and psychedelia and, frankly, I think it’s really very difficult to make this genre in a more effective way.

2017 – Black Bow Records