Bandcamp Four songs, eighteen minutes, and not one of them interested in being liked. Blüdwyrm are a young Bournemouth trio aiming straight at the throat of the Electric Wizard and Weedeater school, everything tuned down to a crawl and soaked in fuzz until the individual notes give up their edges and turn into weather. The Blissful Sleep Of Ignorance is a debut, and it sounds like one in the best sense: three people in a room finding out how heavy they can get before the walls start to complain.
The titles tell you where the band’s head is. “Preacher Of My Own Demise”, “Isolate”, “The Vultures”, “Pesticides”, a small catalogue of self-inflicted ruin and slow poison. The vocals don’t sit on top of any of it, they’re buried deep in the murk, a guttural rasp clawing up through the riff and mostly losing, which on a record this committed to suffocation reads as the point rather than a flaw. You don’t come here for the lyric sheet. You come for the weight.
What keeps the EP from collapsing into one undifferentiated drone is the way Blüdwyrm use space. “Preacher Of My Own Demise” caves in on itself halfway through, the wall dropping out into a clean, minimal passage that lets the air back in before the crush returns. “The Vultures” pulls the sharpest trick on the record, a raw D-beat lurch and a shrieking noise-guitar break that snaps the tempo clean out of its tar pit. “Pesticides” closes by trading near-silent clean tones against eruptions that, crucially, are allowed to breathe instead of being flattened into loudness. For a debut, that instinct for contrast is the most promising thing on offer.
It is also, still, a debut. The production is gloriously filthy, cavernous and uncompressed in a way that honours the whole lineage, but the low end stacks up so densely that the songs occasionally lose their footing, guitar and bass fusing into a single mass where a touch more separation would let the riffs actually land. Blüdwyrm have the atmosphere and they have the nerve. The next record is where they find out whether they have the riffs to carry it.
This is raw, cavernous sludge-doom recorded to sound like it was tracked in a cellar, and that murk is the aesthetic rather than an accident. Guitar and bass merge into one saturated fuzz wall, the kind where individual notes dissolve into texture, while the drums sit far back with a wet, natural snare and a kick that all but vanishes into the low end. The guttural vocals are sunk deep in the reverb, more presence than language. What lifts it above a single sustained drone is the dynamic writing: each track caves into clean, minimal passages before the weight comes back, and the closer in particular lets its quiet-loud swings breathe instead of crushing them flat. “The Vultures” breaks rank with a rough D-beat and a screaming noise-guitar coda. The mastering is refreshingly un-loud, leaving the whole thing room to move.
Standout tracks: The Vultures, Pesticides
