Album Details

• Artist: Loincloth
• Album: Iron Balls Of Steel
• Label: Southern Lord
• Year of Release: 2012
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: solitaryman on 2012-01-04

Shunning conventional restrictions of songwriting, North Carolina's Loincloth offer instead a mangled, nonconformist view of the almighty riff and the power it holds on Iron Balls of Steel. Each dose is a short, blunt appropriation of various blends of metal, from stoner to sludge to djent (think Meshuggah), an while it is a chore to keep track of each...track...it's never the intention of the album to be dissected as such. It is one long, corrosive, spiraling audition for the title of world's most established riff dealers. And it makes a good case.

No real section is "stand-alone", the whole of the album's 16 tracks molded together such as they are. Each moment is another to marvel at the ingenuity of the guitarists, the ability of the drummer to highlight a particular phrase, bridge or breakdown with preciision and intensity. The sound shifts enough to never leave you reaching for the skip button, the production is top-notch with plenty of crunch and punch. The only real complaints are subjective. For one, I would have appreciated the occasional guitar lead/solo. While the music at hand may not call for them, that doesn't mean they wouldn't have been appreciated and it's easy to notice how they could've been incorporated tastefully and inobtrusively. Lastly, despite being instrumental in nature, Loincloth must persist in establishing a core, fundamental sound beyond the unstable one that spreads itself out over the length of Iron Balls Of Steel. It's far too muddled and up in smoke to narrow it down and, whether or not that was the point, it's the sort of thing that typically only works when done in doses. And this is a large dose.

But, for some, that's what they'll expect for the price of admission. If that's the case, and uncontrollable, stop-start, djent-stoner-sludge-death sounds like something you might want to hear (who wouldn't?), then Loincloth and Iron Balls Of Steel are for you. 

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