Band:	Primitive Man
Album:	Caustic
Style:	Noise, Blackened sludge metal
Release date:	October 2017

01. My Will
02. Victim
03. Caustic
04. Commerce
05. Tepid
06. Ash
07. Sterility
08. Sugar Hole
09. The Weight
10. Disfigured
11. Inevitable
12. Absolutes

Primitive Man - Caustic. The name alone flies in the face of all that is pretentious, and yes, their music does too. Despite that, it's the type of album that leaves you unsure as to whether you're too dumb to understand it, or just dumb enough to try and find a deeper album below the surface.

Caustic is a paradox. On one hand, it's a quintessential sludge metal album. If I had no prior knowledge what "sludge metal" was, and was forced to write a book report on it, I'd probably end up describing Primitive Man. It's a filthy ooze that just pours from your speakers. A slow, heavy pounding on the bottom, paired with fuzzed-out, abrasive guitar noise rounding off the top end. The vocals match the guitars in their imperfectly perfect delivery; throaty, gutteral cracking, somewhere in the ballpark of a more cavernous sounding Martin Van Drunen.

In that sense, Caustic is a perfect sludge metal album.

Here's where things get conflicting; the album gets pretty dull, pretty fast. Yes, they execute their craft flawlessly. Grab any track off this album and, standing on it's own, it will blow your proverbial dick off. Looking at the big picture though, Caustic is tediously monotonous. Nearly eighty minutes of glacial noise with little noticeable change is a bit hard to justify praising.

...Bringing us back to the whole "paradox" thing. Caustic could just be a dumb, boring, albeit fleetingly entertaining album, but considering how well Primitive Man do what they do, thinking "Maybe I'm just a moron for not getting this" is also reasonable consideration.