PHANTOM GLUE

Boston's PHANTOM GLUE are lucky that sludgy metal is kinda like pizza -- when you want it, and you find it, even bad pizza is still good. You may not remember you ate it after the heartburn fades, but it satisfies while it's in your face. That's kinda where I'm at with these guys -- they're not bad by any stretch, and I'm enjoying myself while they're playing, but life-changers, they're not.

There's a lot of HIGH ON FIRE beardo apocalypse metal here, with influences swirling in at various intervals from the likes of ELECTRIC WIZARD, MASTODON, 16, EYEHATEGOD or WARHORSE. It's a good mix -- doomy enough to rattle your bones but never too far away from something more rockin' and violent to snap you out of your funeral torpor. It's an abrasive little beast, to be sure, a sort of sampler candy box of all the good subterranean hesher metal out on the circuit today.

The only negative, and to some it won't even be a big deal, is the overall facelessness of the whole thing. PHANTOM GLUE, at this stage, are the kind of band you'll put on your iPod and then identify incorrectly every time they pop up in the shuffle. They lack enough personality to make any of their admirable influences into something new or uniquely their own. They're off to a good start, though, and with this filth-caked debut as a launching point, there's no reason to think they won't be lurching around the country alongside their influences, polluting stages for years to come and figuring out what their own spin on the heavy is eventually gonna be.