is an ironic title for an album that's anything but sedentary and inert. Although the dirgey grind of 's debut release is retained here, there's also a newfound amphetamine rush to this material, the band drawing more explicitly on some of its punk and hardcore roots. Speed is of the essence and, in contrast with the first album, just one track lasts for over five minutes. Short and sharp, and suggest a band gripped by white-line fever: furious riffing sets the pace, but the rhythm section's relentless, stripped-down drive is the engine of 's attack, with drummer playing to bassist 's . Indeed, mates metallic heft with punk's economy and tempo in a coupling that evokes the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Nowhere is this louder and clearer than on the opener, its pummeling charge and twin guitar lines channeling . Despite the revved-up assault, on several more expansive numbers reprises its trademark sludgy trippiness. emphasizes the band's spacier tendencies, its fuzzed-out -like bass anchoring a spiraling, mesmeric groove; elsewhere, the trudging makes room for some of the melody squeezed out of the compressed, riffcentric tracks. However, the most memorable numbers bring together the two competing sides of 's sonic character: for instance, oscillates between zoned-out torpor and surging intensity, while the bad trip of moves from a -style disoriented plod to a frenzied climax. might be something of a side project for its members, yet it bears none of the signs of ironic hipster-dabbling that often mark such ventures: not only does attest to absolute fluency in the metal idiom, it shows a band prepared to experiment with and expand it. ~ Wilson Neate