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Rating: More comprehensive than its predecessor "Nola," the second chapter of the Down saga perfectly pays homage to the caliber of this great band.
Darkness, light, fire, and mud combine to create a rough and powerful sound inheriting a 70s heritage revised in a modern and more metallic key, being played by five metalheads in love with the blues and proudly connected to their roots: Phil Anselmo, no need to list his bands, Pepper Keenan (Corrosion of Conformity), Kirk Windstein (Crowbar), Jimmy Bower (Crowbar, Eyehategod, Superjoint Ritual), and Rex Brown, no need to say more about him either.
The album is excellent: well played, well composed, well produced, with a great choice of track list, remarkable changes of atmosphere, and not at all monotonous.
Phil Anselmo truly shines with his splendid voice, which, after some darker periods, seems to almost reach the peaks of Pantera's golden era, best adapting to the song and the guitar melodies and riffs, with a rediscovered expressiveness and enviable transformism that is expressed in his mastery of the scream in the more metallic tracks, a warm and hoarse blues singing in the more hard rock tracks, a darker and more ominous singing in the arpeggiated and dark pieces of the album. Hats off, of course, to the musicians, especially the two guitarists, capable of crafting riffs smelling of Sabbath, metallic outbursts stopped and rhythmic, ominous arpeggios, and hallucinated solos.
The album opens with "Lysergik Funeral Procession", a massive and menacing hard rock driven by guitar power; "There's something on my side" is a more hallucinated and metal song, "Stained Glass Cross" is among the best tracks on the album, a southern blues with a wild organ and riffs that vaguely remind of Lynyrd Skynyrd (apart from the artificial harmonics!) and Anselmo's voice reaching one of the album's highest peaks. The mood changes with "Ghost Along the Mississippi": the atmosphere is dark from Kirk's initial riff. "Learn From My Mistake" is another track that deserves the label "best of the album," with great work from the guitarists, who duet brilliantly, especially in the solos; "Beautifully Depressed" shows Anselmo always in great shape, with a rough singing without screaming, but with excellent vocal lines. "Where I'm Going" features the best arpeggio of the album, with the southern echo never stronger; "New Orleans is a dying whore" is the most menacing track of the album, with decidedly more metallic riffs reminiscent of Crowbar, yet with a stunning melodic part during the guitar solo. Finally, hats off to tracks number 13 and 15. The first, "Flambeaux's jamming with St. Aug" almost sounds amused, with tremendous work by Rex Brown overshadowing the guitars, making them background to the bass.
The last song is another masterpiece, a beautiful end to an excellent album. "Landing On The Mountains of Meggido" is a semi-acoustic track with various changes in atmosphere, but predominantly dark. Anselmo's singing is anguished and dark, the arpeggios instill fear, the finale is a piling up of effects and sounds that literally make the mind travel and ferry the listener into unknown and sublime atmospheres: the same effect I experience every time listening to Doobinterlude, the instrumental track placed in the middle of the album, a classic "journey" piece, unsettling and psychedelic with hypnotic guitars and disarming calmness, it sums up the entire psychedelic charge of the album, recreating its atmospheres and abruptly stopping like a nightmare to bring the listener back to the reality of the album.
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