Based in the same seedy Prison City that Crucial Blast calls home, this local outfit finally crawled out of the muck with their first full-length Unto The Nothing, and it might well be the heaviest thing on this week's new arrivals list. A misshapen monstrosity stumbling out of the most abject depths of doom metal, this trio belts out one seriously ugly and gnarled racket on their debut, that's also not without the rare moment of haunting prettiness that serves to make their ugliness sound even uglier. More than anything though, these creeps lean towards long, lumbering passages of crushing droning riffage that threaten to stretch into infinity, building a wall of hypnotic black sludge out of horrendously detuned instruments and rotten amp-noise that occasionally births some twisted, writhing burst of stoned groove, or will pull apart into a damp, crumbling passage of desolate slowcore. The look of this album alone makes quite the impression upon the listener: Unto The Nothing features amazing original album art from Aeron Alfrey, who did the dust jackets for Subterranean Press's reprints of Thomas Ligotti's Grimscribe, Noctuary and Songs Of A Dead Dreamer, and his visions of a nightmare forest filled with flayed corpses, severely deformed mutations, grotesque demonic oaks, and chattering insectoid horrors is done up in a mix of collage and illustration that looks like a JK Potter piece gone completely apeshit. It makes for a striking visual accompaniment to Fortress's grueling, ghastly negative sludge.

The likes of Winter, Celtic Frost, Worship and Autopsy have all been invoked to describe the band's torturous slow-motion heaviness, which are all fairly apt. The album takes awhile to get there, though, with a long, smoldering build through plaintive guitar chords hovering over a vast field of dead-eyed amplifier drone and mesmeric feedback hum. For a brief moment, that almost suggests a horribly withered, sun-blasted take on White Birch-era Codeine, but once everything finally and violently crashes in though, it's like suddenly being buried underneath a large mound of peat, all crushing down-tuned torpor and Sabbath-on-ketamine glacial blues. When "Fight The Son" kicks in, the mood changes to something even more violent, a chugging, gnarled mass of diseased Frostian riffage, the sledgehammer swing of their riffs mounted to the drummer's monstrous pachyderm groove, while the phlegm-clotted guitar leads rise out of the sludge in a sour miasma to be drawn out over the gluey heaviness. There are a few more moments where the distorted dirge falls away and unexpectedly pretty melodies briefly surface through the murk, and there's also some pretty catchy riffage that shows up when songs like "Lies & Fears" and "Stolen Graves" suddenly surge into their rocking, fuzz-drenched groove. Nothing's most haunting passage comes with the elegiac feel that creeps into the titanic dirge of "The Nothing", as an ethereal female voice drifts out of the gloom, a fragile siren-song lilting over the singer's half-whispered croak and the funerary crush of the band. These guys manage to bring an interesting spaced-out vibe to their grueling slow-mo grind with the multi-tracked vocals and strange somnambulant vibe, the songs frequently disappearing into a black hole of billowing feedback drone and cavernous low-end drift, and in the end the album manages to bridge the agonized crawl of early funereal death-doom bands like Thergothon and Winter, and the crustier, drug-fucked misanthropy of Grief and Noothgrush, wrapping it all in a strangely dazed fog of glacial amp-buzz. Take it from me when I tell you that there is no heavier band to be found creeping through this vile, stinking town.

Available on digipack CD and gatefold LP in casewrapped jacket with download, limited to three hundred copies.