Label: Underdogma Records
Released: November 28, 2006
With a name like Wooly Mammoth, this band has a lot to live up to. They either have to live up to the name literally as the heaviest of the heavy or ironically as light and fluffy pop. Few will be displeased that they opt for the former even if they don’t fully live up to that heaviness.
While I was expecting Wooly Mammoth to take on the extremes of the stoner/doom sub-genre with extended drone jams in the mold of Sleep, they’re a much more straightforward band. Like most stoner bands, they have a strong affinity for 70s hard rock, Black Sabbath in particular, and they stay truer to that with heavy riffs and songs that actually move along at a decent clip rather than the experimentalism of their more extreme peers. Occasionally, they drift more into the realm of grunge (a la Louder Than Love-era Soundgarden) which shows that they’re rooted more in rock than far out theories. The Temporary Nature does stretch out at times and manages to walk that line between cutting loose and coming unglued, showing it to be both wild and disciplined at the same time.
Wooly Mammoth isn’t the band that pushes the limits of heavy music, but without bands that are somewhat grounded, it makes pushing a moot point. On The Temporary Nature, they take heed of the challenges from those who do push without forcing those challenges all at once upon unsuspecting listeners.
Rating: 7/10