Bandcamp CRUD started in Miami in 2015 and this is their first album. Eleven years to a debut is long enough that it stops being a delay and becomes a decision, and the record sounds like one: there is nothing tentative anywhere on it.
The band began as a two-piece, Julie Mejia on bass and Mariel Zayas-Bazan on drums, and filled out later with Kris Garcia on guitar and Andy S. on vocals. Jonathan Nuñez recorded, mixed and mastered it at Sound Artillery in Gainesville. The titles tell you where the anger points, from “ICE Breaker” at the front to “Disease Ritual” at the end, The vocals are harsh throughout and sit low in the mix, closer to another layer of the wall than to a lead.
Eight tracks that refuse to get shorter
The thing that surprises first is the length of these songs. Sludge played with a punk attack usually arrives in ninety second bursts. Here only “Knee Bender” comes in under four minutes, and the rest sit between four and five, with the closer past five. That is a band using the riff as a place to stay, and across thirty-four minutes it gives the record its weight.
It also sets the terms for the production, which is loud and flat and means to be. Four of the eight tracks hold their whole body inside three decibels, which is roughly the width of a sustained chord, and six of the eight stay under six. The two exceptions are the first and the last. Coming from Nuñez, who plays in Torche and has spent years making records like this hit as a single mass, that is a deliberate choice, and in this tradition it is the correct one.
Whether it stays correct for thirty-four minutes is the honest question. The opener and the closer both open out to around twelve decibels of range, and both are better for it. In between, the record arrives at full pressure and stays there, and by the time “Boiling Angels” is doing it for the fifth track running you have stopped noticing that it is loud.
Recommended, and particularly if the slow, bass-led end of sludge is where you live. Eleven years of playing together is audible in how little the band push: nothing here is hurried, and the riffs are allowed to sit until they are done. The reservation is the middle stretch, where five tracks sit at the same level and in the same register and start to merge. Start with “Disease Ritual”, which is the widest and the best thing here, then go back to the top.
This is a deliberately flat record and the numbers say so plainly. Four of the eight tracks keep the distance between their quiet and loud passages under three decibels and six stay under six, and every track on the album sits within a decibel of the same average level. For slow, bass-heavy sludge that is the tradition, and the point of it is sustained pressure.
The two that break the pattern are the bookends. “Disease Ritual” and “ICE Breaker” both run about twelve decibels of range, four times the album’s norm, and they are the two tracks where the arrangement visibly gets somewhere. The spectrum is steady throughout, with the weight low and in the middle and no track noticeably brighter or thinner than its neighbours.
Standout tracks: Disease Ritual, ICE Breaker, Demiurge Blues
