Spiral 25 came to my attention when I saw them supporting Golden Animals in Oxford, their home city. Oxford's produced a lot of bands over the years, some big and some small, and I've had the pleasure of seeing quite a lot of them in the city's (few) quality music venues. Spiral 25 are the latest in a line of support bands to really catch my attention, with a sound that caught me somewhat by surprise. Purveyors of gloopy, mountainous sludge/psych rock, their sound fills a room like treacle.Happily, then, the band have a self-titled EP. It consists of four tracks, which are fairly samey but that's the nature of Spiral 25's music and not really a bad thing. Closer 'Today's Future (Tomorrow's Past)' incorporates some harmonica, but it's the exception to the rule. This is not music to notice specific details about - it's enveloping, consuming music. The guitars, squeezed between drum beats, wrap around you and pull you along. Spiral 25 don't really rock, but instead they - in the best possible way - suck. This sense of being sucked in and along is exacerbated by the vocals, which consist of lines ending with long notes which are dragged out even further by echo, turning them into cosmic wails, overlapping one another, and meaning that this EP is as much a wall of voice as it is a wall of guitars.While as rough around the edges and brief as you'd expect from a debut EP by a genuinely independent band, Spiral 25 is an engaging and encouraging listen. On future and longer releases I'd hope the band can introduce some more varied song structures and instrumentation, but for the time being their sound remains more than big and vortex-like enough to be interesting. Definitely worth playing loud and giving yourself up to, this is an impressive four song package.Spiral 25 on MySpace