Red Fang

There's a soft, almost jolly quality to a great deal of metallic stoner rock, a kind of introspectiveness and sweater-soft fuzz that can gentle the sludgy stomp. Red Fang make no pretence toward tenderness with their third full-length, Whales & Leeches, openly looking to crush and lacerate. "Blood Like Cream" revels in a positively gory sensuality, luxuriating in phrases like "paint your lips with blood." "Failure" transitions from driving, martial drumming to an oozing, lugubrious trudge of betrayal, raw and vengeful. The seven-minute "Dawn Rising" is the record's centrepiece, a writhing, tentacled leviathan of a track that grasps onto and rips apart everything in sight. A plunging, probing and unapologetically bloody release, Whales & Leeches doesn't see Red Fang veering far from their signature, grooving sound, but they deploy all the tricks in their musical arsenal extremely effectively, refining them into a terrible, sharpened point.