ZOROASTER

Atlanta's ZOROASTER started going down this rabbit hole on last year's "Voice of Saturn", and on "Matador", they've given over fully to the lysergic carpet mold that's eating their brains and telling them they're interstellar warriors. They're morphing before our eyes from a slow, apocalyptic band of sludge-heads into this weird, spacey delivery system for psychedelic bricks of droney, languid black hole metal. They're becoming the kind of band where the rack of effects pedals (if not the Walgreen's clerk selling them their cough syrup) should be credited as a full band member, and where the whole of the album seems not so much written and performed but dreamed and sweated out of the musicians' pores in some mystical sweat lodge ceremony.

The end result may not be overtly teeth-gnashingly metal enough for some people, but it's really, really well done, and it's a helluva unique trip. In this age of singles and MP3's, this is an album, its ebb and flow best digested whole, in one sitting, with undivided attention. Bits and pieces of hooks flow by in the sonic stream, only to sink into the surf (hey, where'd that quintessential stoner riff at the end of "Odyssey" go?) and become part of the maelstrom. We do get "Trident", a short and comparatively boogie-ing rocker (that somehow makes me think of STEREOLAB every time it starts up — that's probably just me). But it quickly dissolves into the feedback, squall and churning bassline of "Firewater", a hypnotic beat slicing through the screech and sending us right back out into another galaxy again.

The band that ZOROASTER was even a year ago is a slowly dissolving construct on "Matador", puddling into drugged-out atmospherics and hair-raising soundscapes best ingested while overmedicated and thinking great thoughts. Bits of their old sludge past creep by at times — the churning dirge "Old World" and the black-metally riff to "Black Hole" coming closest to that metallic zone. But even here, the multitracked, chanting vocals seem to be setting the tone for some ancient rite, and the tones are not heard so much as felt, deep in the chest. It's heavy, yes, ridiculously so... but it's also spooky, and kinda otherworldly and haunting, too.

ZOROASTER aren't writing half-hour YOB-like alien broadcasts yet, but they seem to be equally as transfixed by something no on else on this planet can hear. It'll be interesting to see where they take it from here, "Matador" being a slithery epic of ambient chaos that's not so much better than the rest of their catalog as alien to it. Freaky shit, man, but it rules, and you won't hear anything else like it any time soon.