Japanese power trio BORIS come back to Philadelphia for the first time in two years ! Total fucking heavy rock obliteration. Get the shit kicked out of your jams with brutal leaden rumble, body-wrecking psych-punk, spine-breaking metal, and soaring psych, noise and power drone madness. Not to pigeonhole, but Japanese metal dudes aren't exactly known for their accessibility. So it's great to find sludge trio Boris finally shredding the stereotype. Awesome melodic, conventionally structured, and aggressively addictive heavy stuff. Echoing Sabbath and Melvins more than Opeth or Darkthrone, opening a gateway to heavier music for metalphobes, while providing an antidote to the more polite, popular strains of indie pop for those that might be seeking one. Ratcheting up the volume on terrain recently tiptoed by Queens of the Stone Age, Death from Above 1979, and Trail of Dead, they flirt with shoegaze and ambient sounds, but always hold their pedals squarely to the metal THIS IS THE ABSOLUTE MUST SEE BAND OF THE SUMMER - LISTEN TO THESE SOUND CLIPS. PURE BRUTALITY.

Russian Circles are a heavy rock instrumental duo from Chicago. Comparisons to Pelican and Isis have been tiresome at best -- and inaccurate at worst -- as RC differ in key ways. The construction of their tunes is more intricate, not reliant as much on the heavy riff and the elegant phrase -- though it's not quite as delicate as Explosions in the Sky or Growing, either. Tight, constructed yet somehow sprawling rock, there is vulnerability amid the heaviness and noise. It's like a form of instrumental poetry, woven, articulated slowly and deliberately, and all designed to take you "there," wherever your particular "there" is. The buzz on this band in Chicago has been big and it's easy to see why. Now playing with Botch/These Arms Are Snakes bassist Brian Cook. Suicide Squeeze.

Disappearer
Another batch of slow burn, churning doom drenched epic metal, steeped in convoluted math rock and blissed out post rock. You know what we're talking about. Disappearer fall WAY on the heavier end of that spectrum, with massive downtuned guitars, pummeling drums, soaring psychedelic leads and guitar harmonies, a gloriously lurching monstrous groove, loping and hypnotic, huge sweeping waves of melancholic post doom rock bliss, cymbals explode and sizzle all over the proceedings like acid rain, the bass grinds and throbs, pushing everything along like some ominous black tide, and the guitars, shit, this is all about the guitars, thick layered walls of drop-d sludge, long lazy drifts of glistening guitar minimalism, stuttery stretches of crumbling chug, swirling tangled tendrils of muted melody, all matched push for shove by the drums, sometimes a crushing caveman pound, sometimes a simple shuffling plod, other times an impossibly convoluted tribal freakout.