STONED MONKEY (2017) are from Varese, Italy. To quote their Facebook page, "Sludge 'n Doom Noise rockers STONED MONKEY have signed a worldwide record deal with Argonauta Records! Mesmerizing atmospheres, high pitched amplifiers, heavy soundwalls and a strong scent of the weed distinguish the experience on a STONED MONKEY trip: An unmistakable Sludge timbre mixed with the rhythmic-sonorous intensity by influences such as Doom and noisy Stoner Rock. Music to come soon, in the meantime make sure to track and follow the beast! No vocals, only tons and tons of Watt. STONED MONKEY names their musical influences as WEEDEATER, SLEEP, BONGRIPPER, BELZEBONG and EYEHATEGOD.

The unmistakable sludge timber oozes on track #1 Pain of Mind. No vocals here except for a few random speech samples tossed about the music. This is some sludgy gunk, of the type " we haven't even seen a bag of weed for awhile so let's clean out the bong" musical sludge gunk variety. U Bot adds a few chunk metal scratches but damn, when they said they have "Sludge timber", they ain't foolin'. At the 2:44 min-sec point in the song they take us up for some air before returning snout down to bong doom and some stutter tempo riffage ... not to be confused with snappy ... these cats crawl thru most of this disc.

Slow Sickness track #3 is their Youtube video and continues the slow comfort muck. Taken as a whole, this release has an oozy-woozy comfort about it... it slathers on the googe like shaving cream but never bothers to take the disposable razor out of the package. I mean you can wear this groove and there is no such thing as not enough on this outing. These lads aren't afraid to run around the same block three or four times just to make sure you get the drift.

Green House is my fav on this self-titled debut and has something approaching, sorta-kinda, a dynamics-groove gear change - like from 4 wheel drive granny gear to leave the stoplight 1^st gear. This entire recording has about 6 feet of dirt pitched on top of the riffage which squashes the dynamics a bit ... actually quite a bit. The recording engineer would call that "compression" and make no mistake, if you were bleeding profusely, applying this music directly would staunch the blood flow. Be careful with that axe, Eugene.