Monolord is definitely laying it on a little thick with the cover and title here—Your Time to Shine? A lifeless lepus, wreathed with flowers? A bit of that restrained Swedish dourness goes a long way. Me being my tactful, beneficent self though, I'm going to put it to you even more bluntly: you are a vermin, a noxious nuisance, a dyed-in-the-wool cretin. You're running around the metaphorical jungle of modernity, the great urban holt, red-assed and cross-eyed, flapping your cheeks in the wind with the pride of a blooded noble, bellowing like a being of untold importance and boundless delusion, a shadow that runs before the crumbling ruin of your actual personage, a scared animal shitting under a bush, too dumb and blind to be ashamed of its own specious projections of hubris. Only in death will you attain the aura that you sought in life, because it is the only point in history since your birth when you will be remembered with ubiquitous fondness, owed solely to the practicality that you can no longer do anything to further embarrass yourself and others... It's sorta zen when you think about it. In nothingness, you finally find the serenity of peace that escaped you in life. Ah! Nirvana at last! ...right before you're reincarnated as a tampon. This fatalistic, if backhandedly optimistic, outlook- liberation via the unburdening of life in its continuance- is certainly reflected in the billowing, cosmic star-rangler and veristic tendencies of this inky, astral-hued sludge metal band from the great white North, whose gripping, nature-worshipping, navel-gazing sound is as contemplative as it is flesh-flatteningly heavy. Their mournful, hazy riff-hammering makes its home somewhere along the broken highway between Mastodon and Hawkwind, with dark, beautiful cascades of guitar cracking the sky and lighting your way through the phenomenally thick atmosphere the band has managed to conjure as it leads you to your new abode, a 6x6 efficiency, in the clodded turf of nature's bosom where you can tranquilly dissipate into the successive churn of eons... or more precisely, become fertilizer. A good place to start if you're looking to have your bones ground into plant chow early is the devastating massive opener "The Weary," which hews closer to the chunky beardo-with-a-heart-of-gold, party-pit groove rock of Red Fang, or "I'll Be Damned," with its shovel-hefting, dirt-sifting, crack-and-slam grooves, each repetition of which is like another pound of gravedirt piled on your rotting bones. "To Each Their Own" is a hauntingly somber number, with the crushing gravity of an imploding star, that sucks you in, pulverizes you, and then mixes your dust with a palette of paint which the band uses to revarnish the celestial dome above. Then there is the ten-minute title track, which is fierce and whimsical while remaining compellingly heavy and undeterred, making use of meandering grooves and quivering feedback to leave the impression that you're being boiled in a pot of lysergic pekoe to fill the gullet of a frog wizard while he ponders and stargazes, parcing clouds of violet-tinted scholastic cogitation with the warty weft of his intellect. You might never summit the peak of your facile ambitions, but you can take solace in the supposition that you'll at least be helping to keep the grass greener once you're gone.
