(Sludge, Doom Metal, Psychedelic Rock) Nightstick - Ultimatum - 1998, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

Purveying detuned, grungy, psychedelic metal a la Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, or (more recently) Monster Magnet, Nightstick is a power trio consisting of bassist/vocalist Alex Smith, guitarist Cotie Cowgill, and drummer Robert Williams. Their albums include 1996's Blotter, 1998's Ultimatum, and 1999's Death to Music.
The band has a dancing clown on stage with them while they play live. His name is "Padoinka the Clown".
The band was put on hold for four years due to one of the band members being incarcerated. They were re-activated upon that band member being released back in 2004.

Nightstick sounds like nothing else you've ever heard, especially if you consider Ultimatum came out in 1998, really the nadir for extreme metal. Any descriptors for this album fall horribly short, in the way the words can only describe music or art so well before you actually have to hear or see something so wondrous for yourself, to understand the hyperbole at play. To pigeonhole it into any genre likewise does a complete disservice to the massive scope of the album and the incredible variety contained therein.
Calling it sludge belies the fact that it is decidedly experimental and absurdist, probably one of the weirdest, most experimental extreme metal albums released to that point (and might be still to this day, not simply experimentation for the sake of experimentation, but in the service of making great music). The first song on the album, "Ultimatum: 'Cut it off, then kill it'", contains two things unique to this album: One, the vocals consist of dialogue snippets recorded during the first Gulf War, featuring the voices of Dan Quayle and Collin Powell among others; And two, it contains a nearly song-length saxophone solo, easily the best sax solo in the history of heavy metal. That saxophone howls and squeals an almost indescribable racket, the closest comparison being Hendrix's solo during "Machine Gun," a song this could easily be an homage to. Equally weird is recording three different versions of the same song ("Ultimatum") and somehow making each sound markedly different (a second features the elder President Bush making a speech about Saddam and Iraq, which given the current situation is almost too strange, and the third, recorded live, features no vocals or sound bites at all). Throw in a cover song that gives writing credits to both the French composer Hector Berlioz and British hardcore punks Discharge, and a 7 minute track ("August 6th, 1945") that sounds like an airplane in flight coupled with a military march, and you have an album that is just strange. The vocals too (when there are vocals; fully four of the songs are instrumentals, years before "instrumetal" became it's own insipid genre) are much different than just about anything for metal at the time, being neither growled nor screamed nor sung; instead they are confrontational shouts, fairly toneless and definitely pissed off sounding.
To call Ultimatum doom is to give the short shrift to a third of the album's songs that rock as hard as anything Kyuss or Fu Manchu had done to that point. "Pig in Shit" charges ahead like AC/DC on meth and steroids, far heavier and meaner than anything Angus Young ever wrote; this is the kind of rock song bands have been rocketing on for forty years, the kind that causes the involuntary headbanging and air guitar that have always been hallmarks of great rock songs. While these three songs don't feature the most virtuosic playing, they have a sort of loose, free-for-all feeling that make them compulsively listenable. These are more stoner rock or hard rock than anything (gleefully malevolent are the words that come to mind), and if it wasn't for the subversive themes and anti-government lyrics, it isn't hard to imagine "United Snakes," "The Pentagon," or "Pig in Shit," being played on the radio.
Neither does noise rock do this justice, as it's far more pointed and probably meaner than anything AmRep released in the mid to late 80s or Touch and Go released in the early to mid 90s. Even at their heaviest, none of those bands ever had the bass guitar sound that rumbles through this entire record; it's a thick fat bass sound, and while it dominates the guitars occasionally, it just makes the music all the more ominous and agressive. The guitar solos too are at odds with much of what the noise rock underground had been doing for years, the solos themselves not much different than what would've been heard on any 70s hard rock album, tuneful and melodic, but always with a slightly sinister bent. And noise rock bands, except maybe Shellac, never stretched their songs out the way Nightstick stretch them out on Ultimatum; whether using feedback and guitar skree, or opening bass lines that last for minutes, these are not the terse blasts found on early Helmet or Killdozer. These are muscular heavy epics, that while not conforming to the metal standards of the time, are thoroughly metal.
And while this is definitely metal, to label it so succintly is to leave out so much of what makes Nightstick so great and Ultimatum such an amazing album. This has the feel of the sprawling rock epics of the 70s, when the future of music was truly an open horizon, freed from the need for radio play and critical acceptance where bands could and didr overreach with sometimes awe-inspiring (and sometimes gag-inducing) results. Ultimatum has the free-form feel of a live record or one of those 70s double LP concept monstrosities, but the songs themselves are so well-written, you find yourself humming them days later. What's also interesting is how far Nightstick go in subverting the traditional metal sound while still basically adhereing to it. Ultimatum is a bass driven album, almost exclusively so; it rumbles and shakes it's way through the entire album, propelling these songs forward in crushing rhythmic heaviness. You have to remember that in 1998, having the bass guitar be the primary instrument was near complete novelty. The drummer bashes and smashes away so hard it's easy to picture him sitting behind his kit shirtless, dripping sweat and breaking stick after stick, always just one hit away from breaking into a full-on rendition of "Bonzo's Montreux"; this is a rhythm-dense album, and while not entirely unique at the time, presaged a sound would only come to prominence years later. Also interesting for extreme metal at the time is the role the guitar plays, content, for the most part, to play behind the bass, following the rhythmic undulations, forgoing melody for the sake of a truly different sound.
So while Ultimatum is ostensibly and superficially sludge/doom/noise rock/metal, it's really much more than that. This is heavy music, yes, but it's also dense music, and more than in just it's sound. This is grand musical experimentation with amazing results, an album that is both catchy and crushing. Since it's release in 1998, there still haven't been many albums like this, where bands are willing to obliterate genre boundaries and forget convention altogether, and that's one reason why this stands as such masterwork. It's unfortunate that it was released at a time when there was no one around interested in hearing it, and it's even more unfortunate that this has been summarily overlooked in the years since this style, a style Nightstick pioneered, has come into vogue. Track this down, find this, get this however you can; this is a monumental piece of doomsludgedronenoiserock heaven, a heaven unlike anything you've ever heard.

Alex Smith - bass/vocals/violin
Cotie Cowgill - guitars
Robert Williams - drums
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Jim Hobbs - alto sax (#1)
Bob Clark - guitar (#7)
Tony Rossi - guitar (#7)