Back in print on vinyl for the first time in a decade, Thou's second full-length album Peasant has been remastered and presented with all-new artwork, packaged in a heavyweight gatefold jacket with spot-varnish printing

and accompanied by an oversized twenty-page booklet. In addition to the complete original album, this reissue also tacks on the songs from their 7" EP To Carry A Stone and the Malfeasance - Retribution 10", both of

which had come out around the same time in 2008. Immense, monumental music from the early days of this famed band. Here's the old review from the original CD release:

Another excellent disc of ultra slow heaviness from Thou, the young Baton Rouge outfit that has been taking the doom/sludge underground by storm this year with their debut Tyrant and recent U.S. tour, reports of which

have been coming back with the assessment that Thou kill fucking everything. Louisiana and New Orleans have been the breeding grounds for leagues of sludge metal bands, Eyehategod and Crowbar obviously the overlords of that

particular little pocket of underground metal, but every once in a while we get a band that comes out of that scene and pushes the swampy sludge/doom sound further out, putting their own unique stamp on it, and such is the case with

Thou. I hear a lot of NOLA's Eyehategod in the deep, bluesy sludge, but the riffs are even heavier, more metal, with a massive fucking tone that sounds like none other than the mighty Warhorse, whose guitars were some of the

heaviest ever heard. But it is the amazing melodies that Thou brings to their pulverizing slomo metal that really makes them stand out, each song possessed by gorgeous sections of near-pastoral prettiness, or soaring, majestic

leads.

Peasant delivers six long tracks of crushing, crusty doom and viscous sludge, and fans of Tyrant will find more of what they loved about that album...blackened, evil shrieks and raspy, shredded near-whispers, ultra-

crushing detuned riffage, sprawling song structures that move dramatically from epic crush and bluesy riffing to bittersweet melody. Opener "The Work Ethic Myth" evokes the sorrowful dirge of Crowbar but with delicate guitar filigree

wisping out from the grinding undercurrent, while "Burning Black Coals and Dark Memories" opens with a beautifully moving clean guitar melody a la Mono before descending into a morass of tarpit droneriffs, feedback stretched into massive

warbling whale songs and swirls of spacey effects. Fans of extreme doom and sludge metal have a lot to dig in to here, if you're already a devotee of bands like Corrupted, Monarch, Khanate, Trees, but Thou take it further than that,

bringing a majestic, Temporary Residence/Mono/Explosions In The Sky sort of melodic beauty to their music that never takes away from the sheer grinding, lumbering CRUSH of their music. Like the last album, this is accompanied by imagery

taken from old woodcut style art, which illustrates the social/political undercurrents in Thou's lyrics through apocalyptic visions and symbols, rendered in eye-popping high contrast. Recommended.