On BISON b.c.'s latest slab, Dark Ages, relentless touring - with the likes of Priestess, Baroness, 3 Inches Of Blood, and more - has fine tuned the band's dedication to the riff to metallic perfection. Dark Ages breathes like a rabid animal that you'd find tied up in WINO's backyard. It's Flying V's, analog perfection, loud & sludgy, played by hairy dudes in dirty denim jackets.

A bison is "a big, hairy, strong animal," says James Farwell, who plays guitar and sings for Bison b.c. That could as just as well describe the band, which rose from the ass-end of the continent in Vancouver, Canada, to utter its doomed, plaintive call, and tramples through the constellations on its four shaggy limbs (James, Dan And, Masa Anzai, and Brad Mackinnon). Ghostly, windswept prairies, the mythical haunts of native lore: it is all there. Self-described "Canadian dirtbags" and veterans of Vancouverʼs deep thrash and indie scenes, they are hitting their stride and offering up a new soundtrack for our last party before certain extinction. There is illness, abuse, apocalypse, and French horn.

Their first Metal Blade release, Quiet Earth, showed what that earth's last sound might be like. It was heavy, sick, and crazy; stomping and banging, elegiac with cello. Just beneath the rock they described a bad trip through a devastated world where resigned dignity and camaraderie with the friends that remain are the only consolations.

This mixture of rowdiness and gentleness is very much of their hard-living, hard-loving hometown: fucked-up modernity's last outpost on the rim of a vast, menacing wilderness. In their new release, James sings, "Vancouverʼs an empty bottle, our dying thirst causing problems. Stand at dawn, the beginning of something heartfelt and replaceable." No matter where we are, this is what it has come to in this age. So let's listen to these gentlemen and rock out together.