Filth-Kin Druid Gutter Crusters cassette
When I get assigned a release on Phobia Records, I always get ready for some heavy, dark, punishing, pummeling musical bollocking, and it is more often than not a pleasant, if exhausting, experience that I love to repeat. And let’s not beat around the bush here: Sweden’s FILTH-KIN is crust as fuck. On the one hand, they do play gruff, heavy old school crust that abides by the sacred guidelines, but on the other, they are also different in that they include a dirty, organic-sounding, almost psychedelic stoner influence to their cavemen music. The band is made up of members of WARCOLLAPSE, a long-running, well-established crust band that was always openly into weed and wrote some longer songs suiting that hobby. I suppose FILTH-KIN is a project meant to illustrate perfectly the basis of “stoner crust” (or perhaps “crust for stoners”) if it were a genre. As mentioned, the band uses a lot of WARCOLLAPSE’s old tricks (to my delight), but it sounds dirtier and I am also reminded of more groovy metallic bands like DEPRESSOR, DAZD, or ALEHAMMER. And for your discomfort, FILTH-KIN also adds weird interludes to create an atmosphere of unease and dementia and basically makes you feel like that weed might be too strong after all. Heavy, primitive, dark, rocking cavecrust with a penchant for the herb. I’m into it.