Well, this was a surprise. When Sentinel Daily editor Scott Adams offered me the chance to review the new album from Melbourne’s Bentham’s Head, I wasn’t really paying attention. ‘Yes of course’ I said, ever eager to help out our glorious leader. At that point I hadn’t noticed the words ‘progressive sludge’. Or, indeed, the names The Ocean Collective and Mastodon, two bands I have very little time for and which appeared, with that phrase ‘p**********  s*****’, in the band’s biography.

‘I don’t think I’m the man for the job’ I jabbered, but he ensured me, wise old head that he is, that I’d enjoy Blood Salt and Ash. Doubtfully, I took the job on…

… And I’m very glad I did, because Bentham’s Head have delivered an absolutely astounding album in B,S And A; The fact that it’s the band’s debut makes it doubly, trebley impressive because it’s rare to hear a band so young in it’s journey sounding so surefooted and confident in their own abilities. Over the course of the eight tracks featured they construct a veritable heavy metal time machine, extracting the very best from every era and style of the music we love so much and compressing it into three quarters of an hour of spellbinding noise.

That said, at no point to they do anything that makes you sit up and jeer ‘I’ve heard that before!’… Sure there are some gratifyingly heavy passages of riffage where you might think ‘Metallica‘ or, astoundingly ‘Manowar‘, but those moments are fleeting in the context of a gigantic album that presents modern day classics like Oran as living, breathing testaments to the invigorating power of heavy metal.

I’ve singled out Oran because it’s my own personal fave (at the time of typing), but this is one of those happy albums that just keeps giving, meaning new things turn the listener’s head every time you take it for a spin. The only thing that remains static is the class of the musicians making the music – everything else just explodes from the album’s core and then keeps moving at hyperspeed away from the centre, leaving you panting, helpless and fascinated to see what coming next.

I’ll stop now, as I don’t want to wash the central points of this review away in a tide of hyperbole; Let’s just say Blood, Salt and Ash is a very, very good album indeed, shall we?

Blood, Salt and Ash releases on September 20th.