Eyehategod

Though its members have scattered like spores into various projects (Down and Soilent Green among them), Eyehategod will long be remembered not just for doing sludge Metal first, but for doing it best. Though it's difficult to recommend a band that gloried in shock for shock's sake and preached a doctrine of inward- and outward-directed violence, Eyehategod deserve to be heard because they had that rare thing in rock 'n' roll -- vision. They played an ultra-heavy, slow and sludgy style of Hardcore that no one had quite done before, but many have duplicated since. Sometimes referred to as "molasses core" because of its thick, murky texture, the musical mutation Eyehategod wrought upon the Hardcore Metal scene was quickly taken up by Grief, Cavity and Bongzilla, to name a few. Taking the heaviness and menace of Black Sabbath to a gratuitous extreme, these bands revel in briar patches of feedback and blue-in-the-face screaming. All of them owe their existence to the innovators in Eyehategod who tinkered with musical anti-matter and created a monster that, in various incarnations, still walks among us.