The seaside town of Brighton, UK, previously famous for its attractiveness to holidaying Londoners and its apparently sizeable gay population, is at present building a reputation as a haven of devastating Low-end music. Step forward Kalloused whose first foray into recorded output, Damn You Believer (Third I-Rex), begins with the suspense-laden ‘Pt 1’: a weighty tome which possesses a surprising yet subtle line in crunching but emotional guitar.

This delightfully gives way to ‘Pt 2’, a searing vocal roaring out the EP’s title while riffs and rhythms switch from bone-crushing intensity to a quickened Sludge groove and back, the monstrous noise enveloping the listener in a suffocating vacuum. The few seconds of silence in the early stages of ‘Pt 3’, meanwhile, cushion against a ferocious medium-paced barrage of sound, its three-quarter stage a pensive, swelling brute hauling against a thousand leashes.

‘Pt 4’ is a similarly hostile, tethered beast, drowning in sad rancour and screaming bitterness yet unable to explode until the second movement destroys all in its path: the monster’s injustice manifested in a rolling, looping rampage dictated by pummeling drums – the hidden highlight of this bruising set – and a resonant, scarring riff.

Nevertheless, nothing can prepare the victim for the sheer brutality of ‘Pt 5’: a marauding, slurring leviathan infested with deranged Grind and a howling mid-section, broken by a silence as sudden and violent as the preceding savagery. The tortured screams of the track’s second half are accompanied by a slow, burning riff, subtly flavoured with lead flurries and housing a real storytelling ability.

Closer ‘Pt 6’, the longest track here, is an exploration of the previous themes, possessing enough of those breaks in anger yet highlighting a possible need for something atmospheric to heighten the massive potential these boys possess: a hint of which is given in the tolling, nerve-twitching coda. Evincing a more thoughtful Raging Speedhorn mixed with the savage, nefarious groove of much-missed Mancunian whirlwind Jacknife Holiday, there’s also a more serious, almost Blackened edge to this Doom-rooted quartet, and the whole hints at some huge promise.

7.5/10.0

PAUL QUINN