PROGRESSIVE METAL

With 25 years of bong-ravaged, experimental heaviness under their collective cummerbund, Ufomammut are one of progressive doom’s most exalted bands. The Italians’ 11th fulllength album, Hidden (Neurot) is one of the heaviest and most out-there things they have ever recorded. Punishingly heavy but never far away from a deranged curveball, songs like opener Crookhead use absurdly heavy, repetitive riffs as a launchpad for some strange and unsettling exercises in lysergic mind-fuckery. The 11-minute Mausoleum is particularly bewitching. West Virginian longhairs Horseburner have conjured an adventurous substrain of sludge on fourth album Voice Of Storms (Blues Funeral). With echoes of early Mastodon, Nothingface-era Voivod and any number of psychedelic rock bands, ancient and modern, their songs, which include Hidden Bridges and Diana, are inventive and absorbing, but always executed with real…