Band:	Heavy Lord
Album:	Chained To The World
Style:	Doom metal, Sludge metal
Release date:	November 19, 2007
A review by:	Marcel Hubregtse

01. Chained To The World
02. Serpento
03. Maelstrom
04. Darius II
05. Looking Into The Makers Eyes
06. Eternal Crawl
07. Waiting To Die

Sometimes a, so-called, reviewer should be really ashamed of oneself. And one of those is certainly me.
First of all, for the time it took me to finally finish this review, and second of all, and most importantly, for overlooking a great, local, band.
Only last November did I find out about Heavy Lord. And that happened only by accident since they replaced Eria d'Or at Dutch Doom Day 2007. Heavy Lord have been around since 2002 and Chained To The World is already their third full-length (that's including their self-released debut The Holy Grail).
Released in December of 2007 and only now reviewed here on Metal Storm.
The biggest reason for me to keep on procrastinating the review of Chained To The World is the fact that this is for me an almost perfect sludge album. And somehow I wanted to find some fault with it. Well, there is one, and that is that live this band is even better than on album with a rawer bite to it than on this slab. Seeing Heavy Lord live is an experience in itself.
Since Heavy Lord crawl through the quagmire of the sludge netherworlds expect good old Black Sabbath influences. But thank God they have managed to make them into a sound of their own thus only paying tribute to the grand ol' masters and not ripping them off. Once you have heard Heavy Lord for the very first time they are instantly recognisable. With sludge that is always a good thing.
Chained To The World is a varied offering even consisting of two pacier songs in the form of Darius II (with its midpaced thrashy opening riff) and Waiting To Die (the beginning sounding like an old school thrash song). But it is with the slow paced longer songs that Heavy Lord gets it all right. Here they take the time to build it all up so that the song sucks the listener in like a vortex of primordial ooze. Best examples being Maelstrom and Looking Into The Makers Eye. These two especially making me curse myself for discovering these Hellfeetsludgers this late.
People who think that The Netherlands' best metal is stuff such as After Forever, Within Temption, Epica, Autumn, Arjen Lucassen should be ashamed of themselves and think again. It is bands such as Detonation, Hail Of Bullets, Officium Triste, Akelei (promo to be reviewed soon), Obsidian, Non Divine and especially this Heavy Lord that make me proud to be Dutch.
Chained To The World is a sludge album that can easily compete with the best in the world. Well, yeah, why else did we as MS staff nominate it for best Sludge Album from 2007?

And for collectors of vinyl...
Heavy Lord - Chained To The World can be bought directly from the band at their website http://www.heavylord.tk it is limited to 500 copies and wieghs 180 grammes.