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It’s frustrating when a great band goes AWOL for a decade, but this tortoise-like work rate seems appropriate in the world of doom. Californian trip freaks Acid King gained momentum and kudos in the late 90s – as respected as likeminded peers Electric Wizard – but the bowel-loosening trio withdrew from sight after their third album in 2005.
This new LP suggests they’ve been hibernating in their basement all along, wreathed in dope smoke, cranking sinister low-end fuzz hymns and obsessively re-reading paperbacks about Satanic drug murder.
Woofer-blowing hallucinogenic psych-sludge jams are still the band’s evergreen modus operandi, and Lori S is still the most powerful frontwoman in doom, her plaintive shamanic wail reverberating hypnotically over her own scratchy, gargantuan riffs, but there’s perhaps a touch more subtlety to Acid King 2015; the febrile threads of dissonance in Silent Pictures more artistically rendered, the solo in Infinite Skies more elegant in its desolation.
However, more frustrating than the 10-year wait is the faint suspicion that Acid King could knock out three of these a week if they had the energy./o:p
