Weedeater
God Luck And Good Speed

Unkempt beards, guitars, basses, drums, Southern shirts with cut-off sleeves, weed, bourbon, and Black Sabbath are the primary ingredients (not necessarily in that order) that make up this musical offering from the esteemed Southern Lord.

The Weedeater, a U.S. trio consisting of singer-bassist Dave "Dixie" Collins (formerly the frontman of the unjustly overlooked Buzzov-en), guitarist Dave "Shep" Shepherd, and drummer Keith "Keko" Kirkum, delivers in "God Luck and Good Speed" a sickly blend of southern metal, stoner doom, and distorted blues, of which the first few minutes are enough to understand the "green matter" they feed on: slowness, powerful drumming, sludge guitars, and a strained and torn voice (although to a lesser extent than in previous albums).

The nine tracks of the album produced by his majesty Steve Albini (8 songs out of nine) unfold within an already canonized genre (from Electric Wizard to Bongzilla, including the darkness of Southern Lord productions), offering low-vibration emotions, with essentially mid-tempo cadences, slowing down as needed to the darkest doom and granting us some pleasant surprises: the first is the song not produced by Albini, "Alone", which pairs an almost whispered and very clean singing with a very southern banjo, a general atmosphere of a rocking chair in front of a plantation house in South Carolina. The following surprises are the cover, brutalized and slowed down, of "Gimme Back my Money" by Lynyrd Skynyrd (strangely so little cited by stoners...) which perhaps represents one of the most engaging points of the album, and the concluding "Willow", just piano and a few scattered screeches in the background, which instead represents the weakest and most out-of-context part of "God Luck and Good Speed".

Once again, the Los Angeles label hits the mark, proposing a band that, with years of experience behind them, approaches a genre (which too often tends to repeat itself) by arriving through the sweet taste of bourbon of Southern rock.