Frogskin – III – Into Disgust

If someone want to listen to sludge doom without any winks towards stoner but instead solidly muddy and more funeral doom oriented, he needs, as is often the case, come land in Finland where these sounds normally take on a completely different appearance. Frogskin are a fairly experienced band, as their activity spans almost twenty years, even though this III – Into Disgust is only their third full length in a discography littered with a substantial number of releases of short duration. What is important is that Frogskin‘s sound leaves no room whatsoever for melodic passages, because here the most suffocating and incompromising version of sludge is on offer, differing greatly in mood from what is usually done overseas; basically, a track-by-track account seems superfluous, since the whole thing develops with a certain continuity and without any particular variations on the theme, of which there is not even the slightest need, except for what happens in the fourth short track in which two and a half minutes of a disturbing background noise that seems to come directly from the most putrid and recondite abysses of the terrestrial globe are offered. The very long The Pyre worthily closes an album that is 100 per cent convincing without Frogskin doing anything in particular to make themselves well-liked by listeners, starting with a rather extreme scream far from the canonical growl and eschewing any temptation to use clean vocals. The quartet from Nurmijärvi, a neighbouring city to the capital Helsinki, has very clear ideas and translates them musically in a simple, linear but also dramatically effective manner, and it is for all these reasons that listening to an album such as III – Into Disgust is absolutely recommended.

2023 – Iron Corpse