Look at that cover art! It looks like the sort of thing a lunatic spends his days scratching into the asylum walls with his bare hands, until his fingers are nothing more than bloody stumps of splintered bone.
No surprise, then, that the sheer sonic punishment and aural torment of this sounds like the sort of thing that same lunatic has thundering around inside his head, as he pleads to an ambivalent God to kill him. Pleasant stuff, then, from this Liverpool-hailing trio, whose debut record finds them sadistically sludging away in territories not too dissimilar to fellow Scouse sludge goliaths Conan, right down to the distant I’m-up-a-fucking-mountain vocals.
Whereas there is something uncomfortably linear and rather sanitised about Conan, there is a real sense of danger and derangement about Coltsblood. During numbers like Beneath Black Skies, the anthemic guitars struggle to escape the sucking, slow hell below, yet it’s the frenzied bludgeons of Ulfeonar that prove truly horrific. Don’t listen to this by yourself. At night. In a locked room. You have been warned.
