Metal's seen no end of ridiculously-themed artists in recent years, but slug-themed two-piece Slugdge are towards the end of the bizarreness spectrum. These crazy (and devoted) Brits take things one step further than Jarzombek's Slither homage, crafting an entire album of six-minute slug songs laden with outrageously punny titles and lyricisms that echo their fascination with the hermaphroditic paragons of slime and subversion.

Slugdge are no gimmick band, though; their music is cohesively bound together with viscous globs of mucoid riffage and a spectral continuum of harsh and clean vocals. The tracks are informed by the same extradimensionally warped harmonies practiced by Gorguts and Ulcerate as well as the depraved sense of melody I often associate with Deathspell Omega, but Slugdge carve up those artists' breakneck psychosis into a murky, mid-tempo trawl.

Their debut album Born Of Slime has the kind of unpolished, organic sound that lets the band's black metal influence fully manifest, with the phasey blur of double kick slithering over unorthodox interval voicings.