Band:	Saturn's Husk
Album:	The Conduit
Style:	Sludge metal
Release date:	August 18, 2020
Guest review by:	Bad English

01. Death Of Imaginary Lights
02. Black Nebula
03. The Heavenly Ape
04. The Ritual
05. Spectral Haze
06. Mycelium Messiah
07. City Of The Djinn
08. Sand Barrows
09. A Shattered Visage

Who needs MTV videos when we have sludge?

Bigger countries are always under heavier radar surveillance from metalheads than smaller ones. For a smaller country, the only way to get higher in the ranks is to compose something new and cool or whatever is popular. That is where sludge comes in: it's today's grunge. People who don't listen to death metal, black metal, or heavy metal but like heavy music or live an alternative lifestyle often find sludge. In days when there is no need for long hair and jeans, when a long beard is the trademark, these Latvians have found the perfect way to make music. This is the band's third full-length album. Saturn's Husk has some parallels with Oghre, another Latvian sludge band. These two bands have gotten international recognition.

This is somewhat like stoner mixed with slower sludge, Orange Goblin mixed with the Canadian Seer but instrumental. It has psychedelic elements, it has doom; it's a weird combination.

I never liked instrumental albums that much, but this band somehow does it in its own way. The album has fuzzy riffs, and the drums toll as if it were a not-so-funereal funeral doom. Stoner funeral rock? In a radio interview, the band said that they were not happy with their original sound, so they tried to add some keyboards to make it better. Maybe that was the best formula: modern-day jam sessions. We all know that the best music comes out in such a way.

The instrumental songs make it softer; I can picture vocals making it heavier. Phil Anselmo could groove here; they could be a sludge ballad band with softer songs, like Pantera had with "Cemetery Gates." Instrumental music gives you wider imagination here as to how it would sound with vocals. This is too heavy for jazz and jazz lovers, but the concept of instrumental songs and albums is adopted here.

The long songs and different songwriting structure makes you forget how the previous album sounded. It is harder to find a balance to make us all satisfied; this is a long album, one hour in total, but you don't feel it. The songs guide you through one by one and I think that the band did their best here in making a long album enjoyable, because all long albums have weaker songs that we all want to cut, but here I don't see it, to be honest; I can't anymore. It's good that a band could compose so well-balanced an album.

I see a future for this band; this might put Latvian metal on the map again, because after Skyforger, no other band has very high recognition outside Latvia. The right genre, the right time, and the right promotion are important.

We can bury some sand from the black nebula and build a sludge temple.