Floor - Dove

Like the heavy-handed child of the Melvins, the Deftones and maybe the Meat Puppets, Floor come crushing down on Dove, sometimes grooving and always pounding, and offer a sound that heavy music had forgotten about when nu-metal hit the world in the late-90s. Dove was recorded in 1994 as the first album from Floor, and for some reason, not released until now – a fact that makes even less sense having actually listened to the album. “Figure It Out” and “Namaste” are the most grooving of the seven tracks on the CD version of Dove, with a slightly Queens of the Stone Age-leaning sound that doesn't leave behind any of Floor's other apparent influences. Few bands conjure what they look like on stage with their studio output, but you can hear the band painfully lurching around stage during the ultra-heavy, grating beatdown fuck-off of a breakdown that dominates “In A Day.” The closing of the album is an awful lot to listen to, with the metallic excess of “Dove,” clocking in at 18 minutes, and “I Remember Nothing,” the circling, two-note, CD bonus track of another 16 minutes but takes nothing away from the album. After nailing out five heavy slabs of instinctual brutality, the heavy dirge and swirling, Sabbath-bent death march of the final two tracks makes clear that Floor are ambitious, even if they end up coming off as something of a metal jam band. [www.noidearecords.com]