Behold! The Monolith – Defender, Redeemist (AFR)

If you come across a band called Behold! The Monolith (complete with exclamation point), you can probably be assured you’re not going to hear flutes, choirs or a lush string section. And you’d be right – Defender, Redeemist is nearly an hour’s worth of sludge-encrusted art metal, all pummeling drums, concrete-thick riffs, epic structures and wild-eyed growls. You could be forgiven for thinking, as first blush, that BtM are big High On Fire fans, as there’s definitely a similarity in sound. But further spins reveal not so much a HOF jones as an equally loving reverence for legendary extreme metal pioneer Celtic Frost, right down to the loud-to-soft-to-loud dynamics, tempo-shifting crunch and guttural grunts that substitute for singing. And there’s nothing wrong with that – more metalheads could stand to throw the horns to the almighty Frost these days. Besides, on tunes like “Bull Colossi,” “Halo King” and the 14-minute “Cast On the Black – Lamentor – Guided By the Southern Cross,” BtM sounds less like clones and more like a band who wants to pick up where Tom Warrior and company left off. A noble goal, if you ask me.

http://www.beholdthemonolith.com