Mistress

Fitting that the UK’s Mistress should find a home on Earache, the label that helped get these raw punked-up grind sounds out to the public in a big way once upon a time. And while the occasional falsetto vocal just grates and sounds a bit too wink-wink ironic, the sloppy, slimy, sludgy metal and raw punk and grind make up for that. More than anything, it’s the atmosphere that the band create that sticks with the listener when the album’s over, instead of any particular song or player; and regardless of whether Mistress are grinding or trudging through the swamps of sludge, the atmosphere is an ugly, dirty one. Although the thing goes on for about twice as long as it should, don’t turn it off, because the best moment of the album comes during the last moments of the last song, "Shovel” — riffs slow down to a slug’s crawl but the drummer continues to blast away for a sound I’ve wanted to hear for years.