Georgia has been an interesting breeding ground for sludge metal in the past decade. Baroness, Mastodon, and Kylesa have all made it big in the scene by taking the blueprints of the genre and distorting them. With Matador, Zoroaster can finally be added to this list of rising stars.
The band's previous work is definitely competent and some of their older songs are on the border of being great. Zoroaster, however, was playing it relatively safe and locking itself in the tight confines of it's genre. On this album, the band seems to be taking more risks. The production work, courtesy of Sanford Parker, is relatively clean yet it feels intentionally distorted.
Songs like "Black Hole" and "Ancient Ones" use this warping to their advantage, creating a thick atmosphere. "Black Hole" lives up to it's namesake with it's untamed riffs.
Zoroaster has started to cut themselves loose from their genre's tradition, and their work is all the better for it. If they continue down this path, they might find themselves sharing a lot of the popularity that their contemporaries have received.
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