From the wilds of Cumbria, a rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born...Excuse the clumsy mix of mythography but thus comes Icarus, The Sunclimber the new record from Manatees, Carlisle's finest (ok, only) export of chthonic sludgecore: a monumental album, roaring with ambition and a real sense of career-defining poise. How do you take on the dark, dying art of sludgecore, subvert it and give it new life? Well, you might start with something like this...Manatees, a three piece consisting of Alex, Paul and Greg have been around since 2005. I missed their first record, called either The Forever Ending Jitter Quest Of Slow Hand Chuckle Walker: An Introduction to The Manatee or simply Untitled depending on your RSI worries. Looking back, Untitled in itself was a hugely ambitious album, full of sprawling epics, mining the same whiteout industrial soundscapes of Isis - but always with a flabbier, more chaotic bottom end, that at times threatened to blow the sound apart. They also had a neat line in queasy ambient passages - passages that threatened the breakup of the ground, something unpleasant dragging at your ankles... The UK doesn't exactly have a sludgecore scene as such (Bossk, I guess, and the sinister emanations of Moss from the South Coast apart) but here was a band taking on the scene overlords at their own game - think of the mighty Melvins, Eyehategod dredging themselves out of the Louisiana bayous, the totemic scene figureheads of the Neur/Isis axis - and adding something primeval and rock-haunted.The second record was an EP - (clears throat) We Are Going To Track Down and Kill Vintage Claytahhh, The Beard Burning Bastard, a more subtle affair - at times sounding stately and grand like latter period Earth. But there was still that entropic edge to them - notably on 'The Pulp Cut' which featured a moaning, raging Eugene from Oxbow, and 'The Melee Cut', a huge slice of end-of-the-world metal that threatened to collapse under its own weight. As it was, a few people got a bit sniffy at the (slight) change of direction. Well, they can rest easy.And so we have arrived at Icarus, The Sunclimber. It's a return to Untitled and then some: Untitled squared, hectared. It's a bestial thug of an album: long, brutal, draining, sludgy. It uses the myth of Icarus - a myth so burned into our brains it has the impact of a revealed truth - to fight and fuck with the genre of sludgecore. Sludgecore, as the name so fruitfully describes, is supposed to be arduous, gruelling - it's a style you wade against, battle through - but Icarus, The Sunclimber pulls against the strictures of the genre, throws them off.'Of Wax and Wing', the opening track, lurches into life with an ominous bass line. It quickly descends into a blare of feedback and raw throat screams before disappearing as it soon as it came. 'The Sunclimber', the first of two 10-minute plus tracks, bleeds into existence, a huge - and yes sludgy­­ - yawing chasm of a riff giving way to an almost tribal drum pattern. They sound at their most Isis-like about now. But it doesn't long as the track broadens out into an ambient acoustic dirge that I assume is meant to soundtrack the flight of Icarus as he tests his new wings, soon to become enraptured with them and fatefully hubristic...'Hyperion Altitude' is the most obviously metal-structured track on the album: another monolithic riff over a chopping, thudding bass line; yet the song crashes into 'Untitled', which feels like the beginning of a huge fall. It's a sheet metal crisis of squalling guitars and plague-drums, the latter sounding like they're being played on a coffin lid... The vocals are at there most anguished and raw here, and the track comes under so much pressure it genuinely feels close to splitting apart - the very fabric of the sound pushed to some kind of sonic limit. It's a remarkable thing and it'll be intriguing to see if they can carry it off live.'False Sun' begins on a portentous acoustic note, yet always with that sense of something seething underneath. A sky-wide riff soon comes to dominate the track - sounding for all the world like blistered skin, or a plague of insects. 'Out of the Sky, Into The Gutter' - the album's climax and a 12-minute colossus - is the biggest and most impressive thing they've recorded to date. It's vast, and hugely emotive, with singer Alex Macarte repeating the mantric 'not where they belong' over a churning maelstrom of bottom end. It's a huge statement of intent, epic and ambitious. It takes the tight constrictive chains of sludgecore and runs with them - will Neurosis or Isis ever release anything this powerful and this heavy again? I doubt it. Perversely, Manatees have fought against the earthbound drag of genre and the gravid heft of the Icarus myth and made them soar. Fabulous. 85%Manatees on MySpace