Stoner shite. You know lots of pot was involved in the writing of this record and from what I’ve read about this band a lot of pot is involved before the playing of these songs as well. So if you’re one of those people who came looking for aggressive, precise and technical extreme metal  then please look elsewhere on this site. If you came here looking for porn, then kindly look elsewhere on the web.

Lesbian is a stoner-psychedelic-prog-doom metal outfit from Seattle that released its debut album earlier this year. Basically, Power Hor is a four song album that stretches to an astounding 62 minutes. The shortest song is just under nine minutes while the longest is just under twenty five minutes.

Massive song lengths aside, what this band does on Power Hor is basically write some terrific parts and then string them together with a common melody and a jam feel. There’s a real sense of these songs having evolved over lengthy drug fuelled jams with two or three basic riffs. The songs all crawl to their eventual conclusion and the band seem in absolutely no hurry to get to their destination. The band build each of these four songs slowly with each theme explored to the full before moving to the next one and at times when the band gets heavy there’s a bit of a funeral doom vibe happening (as on Loadbath).

The one thing that works in the band’s favour is that they seem to have more in common with classic psychedelia and Black Sabbath than Red Sparrows and their ilk. Power Hor doesn’t really fall into the post metal bracket and works better as a result. Album highlight is the massive Powerwhorses with it’s interplay between sublime space rock wankery and  heavy Black Sabbath type riffs that are majestic in their doom metal splendor. 

Still, if you’re a casual listener then there are things here that will irritate. Some of the space rock noodling goes on and on and when the band hit a really good heavy riff they want to play it forever and yes the songs do last for days and it’s all a bit self indulgent at times. However, these are the trappings of the genre itself and Lesbian do this style of music way better than most.

Label: Holy Mountain 

Year of Release: 2007