Neurosis are hardly renowned for their upbeat, accessible poppy tunes, but 'Sovereign' is – there's no two ways about this – fucking heavy. It growls, it bucks, it sneers, snarls and bellows, while demonstrating a real knack for quiet / loud dynamics. Above all, it assails the senses with a slow, sludgy propensity for power chords of immeasurable enormity.
Originally released in 2000, this CD reissue also adds a previously unreleased track, in the form of 'Misgiven'. A squall of treble underpinned by a droning bass and distant – very, very distant – drums that sound like planets colliding, it's got enough howling top end to make even my eyes water.
The thirteen minute title track is the absolute centrepiece, a ground-levelling example of sludge drone that crawls on for an age, bludgeoning the senses at a snail's pace for what feels like an eternity – despite being a mere five minutes – before exploding in a roar and a squall of feedback that's nothing short of devastating... and just when things seem to have calmed to an almost bearable level of pain, it resurges, practically ripping your head off with unforgiving sledgehammer noise, before eventually emerging triumphant, a doom-laden fanfare of victory that hangs like smoke in the air over a battlefield strewn with bodies and craters.
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