Fiftywatthead - Fogcutter
Review by John Pegoraro (StonerRock.com)
Signed by Force Records
Release date: 2008


There are some songs that immediately take me back to when I first heard them. For instance, you put on Queen's “Radio Ga Ga” and once again I'm sitting on the floor, in front of my dad's chair, watching Friday Night Videos and Freddy Mercury's prancing around in drag and creeping me the fuck out. For better or for worse, that memory association is there for good.

Same deal with Fiftywatthead (minus the cross dressing). Now I know the Ontario group played the 2004 Emissions from the Monolith Festival. I saw 'em – hell, they were the first band of the day, so I wasn't even piss drunk yet. But until I heard Fogcutter, I couldn't tell you a damn thing about the band, except maybe that the name sounded awful familiar. And yet when lead track “Whiteout” kicked in, I was immediately taken back (“thrown” is more apt) to that Sunday afternoon, ears battered, body aching, watching some scruffy - presumably bearded and overweight - band bellowing at me from behind a wall of beautiful, blissful noise.

Coming across as a dangerous and unhealthy mix of Unsane, Keelhaul, Mastodon, Clutch, and Tummler, Fogcutter is A Statement of Riffs. The four-piece bridges metal with rock, angular, mathy riffs with deep, rolling grooves, and sets about at crushing the listener's head in with methodical precision. Songs like the title track, “Capsized,” and “Four Points,” to borrow a line from Mohammad Ali, float like butterflies and sting like a baker's dozen's worth of surface to air missiles.

That's all good and fine, but the last song, “Followed by Thunder,” is the undisputed highlight. It starts off with a sludge version of the theme of Jaws that segues into a rumbling avalanche of doom. I'm not talking about the genre – I'm saying the song makes you feel like your standing in the shadow of a lumbering behemoth who's hell bent on destroying all in its path (and who apparently also happens to be the subject matter of the song). I've been clinging to Fogcutter all week long and the solos that close out this track still gives me goosebumps. It's epic, massive, heavier than heavy, and makes the album jump from “recommended” to “highly recommended.” You need this one.