Your Highness ‘Your Highness’
Album Review By Adam McCann
Hoogheid Records/Sludge/Stoner Metal
Big on noise and big on riffs, Belgium’s Your Highness have long since cut their teeth on the sludge and stoner circuit and although it was been almost four years since the band released ‘City In Ruins’, Your Highness are back with their latest eponymous offering.
There is no denying it, ‘Your Highness’ is a record of monolithic proportions as the band continue their trend of sludgey-guitars that bubble to the surface delivering thick boils of feedback, crawling basslines and thunderous drums all delivered with the volume turned up to 11. Tracks such as ‘Black Fever’, ‘To Wood and Stone’ and the epic finale ‘Kin’s Blood’ – a song so heavy it dredges up the mud from the Mississippi riverbed leaving it impossible to not see the love that Your Highness have for Corrosion of Conformity, Torche and Crowbar. Through this adoration, ‘Your Highness’ mixes an herbal blend of doom-laden riffs packed full of Southern charm with a twist of heavy melodic blues and it is this twist from the very swamp itself which makes ‘Your Highness’ very appealing, setting it apart from the generic quagmire of sludge.
This is an album where Your Highness stick to their guns, battening down the hatches and deliver another impressive slice of fuzz-driven sludge. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.
Rating : 60/100
MHF Magazine/Adam McCann
