Rwake

Since the late '90s, the experimental acid-sludge band Rwake have managed to develop a sound that puts them off the charts, even as far as extreme thrashing is concerned; maybe it's because growing up in Little Rock, Ark., creates necessary isolation from prevailing metal trends. Despite no obvious pretensions of being badass rednecks, their music sounds like it emerged from some humid backwoods holler in the middle of nowhere, very late at night. Hence, they curiously wind up serving as a bridge between, say, the Southern plod of acts like Clutch and Crowbar and more avant metal a la Isis or Neurosis, without particularly resembling any of the above, per se. Formed in 1997, Rwake sweated out two demos before self-releasing their first official album, Absence Due to Projection, in 1999. Several oddly hallucinogenic long-players loaded with gunk followed, on incrementally increasing-in-size labels Retribute, At A Loss and Relapse, respectively. Members changed along the way, due to spontaneous combustion or other reasons.