The beauty of stoner metal is that it never runs the risk of getting too clever for its own good.
That doesn’t mean the genre is closed to innovation and Wo Fat have been patrolling its darker realms for 13 years, releasing five progressively ambitious albums bursting with piledriving riffs and bluesy, psychotropic reveries.
Straight from Midnight Cometh’s opener, There’s Something Sinister In The Wind, the Texas bruisers hit the ground full-tilt, with swampy riffs that burst into a galloping blast that ends in a blitz of finger-blurring fretwork. Of Smoke And Fog oozes with resinous experimentalism and jazzy accents before erupting into a freakout with a funky breakdown that recalls 70s-era Zeppelin. And Riffborn is a volume-cranking free-for-all, perfect for throwing long manes of hair back and forth. Diverse, aggressive and balanced, Wo Fat have cemented their status among stoner metal’s prismatic visionaries.