Batillus

Named after a super-tanker that hauled oil for Shell in the '70s and '80s, Brooklyn, NY's Batillus honour their namesake on latest release Concrete Sustain, fusing vast, stately doom with decaying industrial excess. Opener "Concrete" creaks and shudders as it heaves its colossal weight along. The pace of this track sounds almost illusory — huge riffs moving like waltzing glaciers, seemingly at odds with the unexpectedly sprightly drumming. Fade Kainer's voice — huge and rasping — holds both echoing loneliness and metallic scraping. Synths and industrial elements lend more than texture to central track "Beset," alternating between static-y mournfulness and howling distain. "Rust" is the most mechanical track, lingering over the nuts and bolts of decay, the technicality of mortality. At their stripped and shrapnel-scarred heart, Batillus are a doom band, and Concrete Sustain carries a bit of the funereal around with it, though the dead it mourns were not made of flesh and bone, but rather concrete and steel.