Deep Blue at Myspace

If there’s one continent mysteriously underrepresented in the metal world, it’s Antarctica. It should be a metal paradise – cold, brutal, isolated, and so mythic. Hell, if you go down there to have a jam session, your sound waves will cause all sorts of mayhem – you’ll crack ice, cause avalanches, and scare polar bears. On the other hand, Deep Blue apparently want a haven from the restrictive drug laws of the rest of the world. I mean, who doesn’t want to smoke doobies with their friends in a bleak, primordial world?

I don’t know if Deep Blue aspire to much more than that. Antarctic Abyss is a short little album, comprised of two 13-minute songs. You know the drill – fuzzy guitars playing slow, psychedelic riffs throughout. The riffs are gigantic, lasting 45 seconds before they start repeating. And they’re kind of cool, but neither of the main riffs is cool enough to merit 13 minutes of devotion. They might be saved by some interesting accompaniment, be it sweet solos or brutal lyrics, but instead we only get the occasional wah-laden guitar flourish and lyrics about how damn cold it is. They’re lucky ‘deep’ kind of rhymes with ‘freeze’, or they’d have nothing to say at all.

Now, when I’m getting blazed, I like a little stoner metal, but I’d rather hear fast, fancy riffs that would send the average stoney baloney running for the hills. But the bands I do like (Sleep, Bongripper, Earth, etc) are repetitive, yet still keep me intrigued throughout. This gets a lot of comparisons to Sleep, but it ain’t the real thing.