A Gram Trip – Bud Ends and Glass Bottoms
Self-released – 2025
Metal, Doom, Black, Sludge
Rated: ***
We stumble through a smoke choked basement where gravity has declared mutiny, as the sound hits in slow, heaving waves, thick, distorted and incredibly mean. Vocals tear through the haze like a doomsday prophet preaching high above a cracked amplifier. Or is he actually below the thing? Everything, everything, everything is down tuned to the point where the air itself vibrates with fear and dread…
We’re listening to the new Bud Ends and Glass Bottoms album by Croatian quartet A Gram Trip and as it slowly starts to suffocate, the record drifts into strange psychedelic detours, like the walls are suddenly shifting and those vague lights you see flickering all around you begin melting. It isn’t the lack of oxygen, it’s the way this band rides their warped currents with reckless abandon, before slamming back into their mire of blackened, sludge-laced heaviness. And then there are those instances where the music suddenly seems to move faster, as if some cosmic force showed itself to be grander than gravity, kicked reality out underneath you and sent everything tumbling into chaos.
It's at those moments when the instrumental ruckus spirals into star dusted delirium that you start to question your sanity. Should you be listening to a band this gnarly? And as they drop you back into another pit of grimy riffs and bleak moods, that sense of bewilderment only grows. By the end, you’re left dazed and crazed, ears ringing, barely able to breath, dragged though a beastly, nightmarish blackened, sludge, doom, stoner metal fever dream you will never be able to shake… Shit, you might still be in it…
(Written by JK)