Monday, September 24: Black Tusk, “Crossroads and Thunder”
“Crossroads and Thunder” closed Set the Dial, and encapsulated that album’s refinements of the template Black Tusk established over their 3 previous records. Not much changed from Taste the Sin, and nothing really needed to, since the song was an appropriately massive bulldozer of a track that perfectly encapsulated the band’s brand of “swamp metal”. If Baroness was already experimenting with new textures by 2010, Black Tusk was sludgy, doomy and stonerrific for its own sake, and “Crossroads and Thunder” came close to being even murkier than Kylesa. Andrew Fidler’s guitars added a thick layer of tar to the Iommi blueprint, James May’s drums rolled and tumbled, and the late Jonathan Athon laid down a fat bottom end. In other words, “Crossroads and Thunder” was prime sludge metal, delivered by knowledgeable practitioners with aplomb.
