Stoner Metal has come to a point where even seasoned listeners and fans of the genre are complaining about the over flow of bands and albums in the genre. But allow me to defend this whole new phenomenon. The more new music you have, the more it pushes the artists to bring out something better and more innovative and will more often than not make better bands to survive and the rest will have to come back with better music next time around. So here we have Stockholm based Stoner band PONAMERO SUNDOWN with their 4th full length album "Veddesta"

The album starts with a mid-tempo trippy song in "Bottom Of The River", which initially sounds like an instrumental because the vocals don't come into play until around 1:45 min. It's a fun trippy Stoner song with some catchy lyrics. The vocals here are clean and go with the flow of the rest of the music, while the drums and bass try to synch with the guitars, which not surprisingly form the core of the band's sound. The raw desert sound of the guitar really brings in some unique feel to the sound here. The album gets slower and trippy with "Hangman's Trail" which has some excellent innovative guitar work than you can imagine. Part of the beauty of the song is in the band's ability to utilize melody in a very intelligent manner, which I have realized more and more bands doing that.

"Restart My Heart" is an energetic song almost sounding like a Hard Rock song, but what stands out here is the Country style lyrics that has a bit of spirituality and philosophy being touched upon here and there. But the good thick juicy riffs and solos are still present and they don't disappoint. "The Fortune Teller" is a vocals driven powerful song with some more cool riffs. But I must mention this, the song, every time when I expect it to go a tempo higher and faster, it surprised me by starting the whole chord and the riff again, but it did get faster and louder towards the latter half of the song.  Even the closing of the song has so much tempo built around it, that it almost feels like that the song has ended abruptly, and quite frankly I have mixed feelings towards that.

"Rhinostodon" stands out on every count. Among album full of songs clocking 3-4 minutes, this beast clocks more than 9 minutes and it packs so much meat that I have lost words to describe it. Were they challenging the Doom bands over how long they can write and play one single song? But honestly, the song is different from others so far and has some intense cheesy riffs with the vocals, drums and the bass providing all the support that is needed for making this one a hell of a song. The song changes its song structure from time to time, often surprising the listener, but it all seems to make sense at the end when the lads have spell their Stoner cast on you!

"Broken Trust" is an In-Your-Face song as the song starts with heavy riffs and high pitched vocals right from its start, and it initially didn't impress as much as other songs have so far. But the excellent guitar work again just left me spellbound and speechless. And the screaming vocals almost reminded me of the grunge sound of NIRAVANA although both the sounds are significantly different. "Dead and Gone" is a perfect song for a modern Western genre movie. It has some lazy macho Stoner lyrics that work just fine with the music in the song. The song has some Drone/ Noise genre sound towards the end, and frankly not all too impressive.

In a day and age when Stoner records are becoming reasons for Metal fans to vent their anger on social media, for the huge number of new releases, VEDDDESTA has something new to offer to the fans of the genre and is sure to please old and new fans of the genre alike.

Final Score: 8/10