However, we really don’t need that sort of introduction for the sludge behemoths that are Remote Viewing; you already know how hard they go, and you’re already on board. Right? Right?
The new album kicks in like any should, a meagre, clean, dirgy entry into a slamming, alarming slab of sludge that is some of the best we’ve seen for a long time on these cold, frigid shores. ‘#makemoneymakelovemakemoney’ is as good as an opening track, as it gets setting out the stall with moaning, trans-dimensional efficiency as it stomps through its five or so minute romp fest of existentially challenging sludge.
And it doesn’t stop there; what follows is 40 minutes of challenging but ultimately cathartic sludge metal, designed and laid out from the members of various well known bands across this great isle. It shouldn’t be ignored; honestly, we don’t think it can be ignored in its forthright indignation, in its molasses of a sound. It drags you in and holds you there whilst it pummels your face into understanding and believing what it’s putting forth. This is a monster, and once unleashed it’s unstoppable, like a shambling slime beast, bred from the depths of a wailing society, set upon us for if only to make us feel something again other than the crushing despair we are waylaid with on a daily basis.
“This is a monster, and once unleashed it’s unstoppable, like a shambling slime beast, bred from the depths of a wailing society.”
From the expansive opening chords of ‘Straight to VHS’ to the dirty riffing of ‘Disrespect the Arts’, this album has one purpose and one purpose only to unveil, or at least bring to the forefront, the suffering we feel on a day to day basis, the injustice and indignity with which we are treated as a mass, the unclean mass perhaps, but the mass that goes to shows and feels the energy of such a crushing bravado as is wielded by Remote Viewing. This album from end to end is a triumph of what it means to make a metal album that addresses and challenges the political soup de jour, and it’s so clinically put together in its Mastodon like heaviness that it comes through like, well, a mastodon stampede coming through the side of your house, to either crush you underfoot or in the pile of the ruble left behind. All through the swooping and soaring effect played throughout ‘HUMAN RIGHTS’ is masterful. It mirrors the waxing and waning of the erosion of rights we are experiencing right now.
Ultimately, this distilled vision of the band is going to do things that none of us can deny. It’s so well put together; the songwriting is so crisp and clean (in the non-sludgey way) that the visceral nature of it just flows through you whilst you listen. The gut-wrenching vocals just wash over you, throughout, sucking the despair from inside just to throw it back out in this great exhumation of spiritual extravagance.
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