Band:	Boss Keloid
Album:	Melted On The Inch
Style:	Progressive sludge metal, Progressive stoner metal
Release date:	April 27, 2018
A review by:	RaduP

01. Chronosiam
02. Tarku Shavel
03. Peykruve
04. Jromalih
05. Lokannok
06. Griffonbrass

Mastodon were among the first to bring together the fat riffs of sludge and stoner and the complex songwriting of prog. The progressive doom resurrection lately has been more focused on the stoner than the sludgy sound, so Boss Keloid come to fix that.

Boss Keloid is an English band taking their name from an Iron Monkey song and if they're in any way the British response to Mastodon, then Melted On The Inch is their version of Crack The Skye. Their first two releases were more sludge-focused, but still exhibiting their songwriting abilities that they'd get to show off later. 2016's Herb Your Enthusiasm saw them mellowing down a bit and pushing more stoner than sludge sounds, and now we have Boss Keloid at their most sophisticated and lush.

But Boss Keloid isn't a Mastodon clone. Sure, both play with sludge, stoner, and prog, but here, the interplay is a bit different. For one, all fronting vocals are handled by the monster that is Alex Hurst, whose voice is similar to Neil Fallon of Clutch with a bit of Rob Zombie and John Garcia in the larger-than-life and gruff voice that sits confidently and commandingly over both gigantic riffs and quieter moments. And this confidence is very clearly oozing all over, from how sing-along-able and versatile the performance is.

One thing setting apart Melted On The Inch from their previous albums is the introduction of the keyboard, a key staple in prog, and making full use of it without it sounding invasive and gimmicky. It supplements the music perfectly and adds an extra retro feeling to an album that already had a sense of nostalgia for both the psychedelia of the '60s and the metal of the '90s. There are few, if any, moments of pure sludge on the album; there's plenty of really heavy riffs, but encapsulated by grooves or more progressive moments. Although I wish there were more moments of unrelenting sludge, the album more than makes up for it in terms of its entrancing songwriting. With only six songs and only one of them under six minutes, we are left both with an all-killer-no-filler album and longish songs that must always move forward to avoid repetition. Melted On The Itch manages both of those things. Its progressiveness stems less from technically complex structures, but from the surprising (not avant-garde surprising, but?) ways they manage to fill the spaces in between the riffs and the more unconventional track structures.

The end result is an engaging and dynamic album, varied enough both to attract a lot of different listeners and to keep them interested. Sure, each of them might end up wishing there was more of their preferred sound, sludge for me, but sure as hell none of them will step away from this album once started.