Lungbutter - Honey LP

Montreal trio Lungbutter serves up an exhilarating and relentless barrage of astringent noise-punk, at times refracted variously through sludge rock and slowcore. Kaity Zozula's tri-amped guitar squall occupies a huge tonal space from low-end bass to paint-peeling treble, redolent of blown-out Melvins/Flipper fuzz and indebted to the frenetic dissonance of Keiji Haino or Merzbow. Song structures coalesce around guitar riffs of shifting tempos and the backbone of Joni Sadler's muscular, deliberate drums, while Ky Brooks' wry phenomenological sing-speak vocals - at once mantric and declarative - deconstruct one brilliant lyrical theme after another, dancing along the knife-edge of dispassionate acerbic examination and wide-eyed cathartic revelation.

Brooks, Sadler and Zozula have all been mainstays of the vibrant experimental noise/rock milieu in the city for several years, having put in time as members of innumerable bands and community projects. Lungbutter has been their main jam for a while, playing frequently in Montreal and with sporadic excursions to DIY spaces around eastern North America. Honey is their first full-length album, following the self-released Extractor cassette EP from 2014, which Big Takeover described as "thick neanderthal sludge, stream of consciousness yelps over lawnmower riffs, a dweeb-metal triumph" and Weird Canada praised as "confident, artful, intense".