The Roller

Wasted Heritage (Cyclopean)

Eons of doom and sludge fossilizing in the Roller’s eponymous 2007 debut harden like Mother Earth on Wasted Heritage. Four-song full-length in a vinyl gatefold, the local metal quartet’s second LP crisscrosses its wall shakers. At two songs per side, the opener of both slows to a crawl, building Sabbath-like on 10-minute A-side beacon “Candle Black,” larynx caw Mike Morowitz calling the slo-mo mosh mantra: “Grow. Rot. Build. Destroy.” Likewise, side two crossover “Passage” (“In death I am alive”) works a chanting cadence into its half-life peyote drip. Both tracks are then met by hardened magma. A slight uptick in tempo on the scalping “Of Feather and Bone” somehow doubles the Roller’s density, as if moving ever so slightly faster contextualizes the music’s massive scale that much more. Fourteen-minute “White Wing” opens with a slight surge then quickly dirges. Colossal. Welcome to prehistory.

***.5

This article appears in December 24 • 2010.

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San Francisco native Raoul Hernandez crossed the border into Texas on July 2, 1992, and began writing about music for the Chronicle that fall, debuting with an album review of Keith Richards’ Main Offender. By virtue of local show previews – first “Recommendeds,” now calendar picks – his writing’s appeared in almost every issue since 1993.