Stoner metal bands ply their thankless trade in a vacuum. Holed up in bedrooms throughout their teenage years, learning every riff from Ride The Lightning, the bands typically have technical chops but lack that inherent charisma that comes from, y'know, regular human contact. Consequently very few of these bands make it big. Occasionally a Josh Homme or Matt Pike will jump the fence from their old band into a more profitable project--Queens of the Stone Age and High on Fire, respectively--but more often than not these bands toil away strictly for the love of the game.

Chicago doomsters Indian aren't about to hit the majors anytime soon, but they play the stoner-doom game very well--Dylan O'Toole's guitar is tuned down to the pits of hell, and Willy Bumgardner's gloriously sloppy drumming. Their second album, Slights And Abuse, eases up on the sludgy drone of their debut, The Unquiet Sky, but maintains that album's agreeably lo-fi aesthetic--both records sound like they were recorded in a storage space in a bad part of town. The most potent weapon in Indian's arsenal is O'Toole's voice--far from the stereotypical grunting, rasping, and other attempts at "scary" voices, O'Toole just sounds like he's screaming unintelligibly at the top of his lungs. Occasionally you'll catch a snatch of some voodoo-ism or other about "violent despair" or "servants of pain" but with or without a lyric sheet the bottom line is the guy has lungs and he knows how to use them, perhaps because he's not filling them with noxious bong-fumes every night--a message on the band's MySpace proclaims the band is "high on the riff, not on the whiff!" Straight-edge stoner metal? Stranger things have happened.

Indian MySpace

Two Ton Sloth is the recording project of producer PZ, a.k.a. Panzah Zandahz and lyricist Brad Hamers. Both artists are based in Portland, OR, and the sound of the record reflects that region’s iconoclastic attitude: loud, Gothic hip-hop beats and mournful samples laced with live instrumentation, acoustic guitars and violins. It’s interesting for the most part, until Hamers steps up to the mic. Hamers isn’t a rapper, and he’s not much of a spoken-word artist either: it’s sounds as if he’s simply written reams of spacey, stream-of-consciousness “poetry” and shoehorned them to the syncopation of the beat, effectively rendering the songs unlistenable. He makes Aesop Rock sound like Grandmaster fucking Flash. The best thing to be said about Two Ton Sloth is that it makes a Panzah Zandahz instrumental album sound comparatively appealing.

Two Ton Sloth MySpace