Deep Cuts don’t follow a groove so much as orbit it, at a distance determined by their cave-troll drummer’s relationship with the concept of tempo, which is to say not a regular orbital distance, not a safe or predictable one, but the kind of elliptical path that swings out past what you thought was the edge of the song and then comes back around heavier than it left, and I want you to understand that I mean this as pure, unqualified praise.

The lineup: a sharply articulate Uruk-hai frontman who clearly knows exactly what he is doing and is doing it with absolute commitment, two dwarven guitarists who carry the tradition of heavy metal craftsmanship in their hands the way their ancestors carried axes and Dan, at the back, the cave troll, the percussive heart and structural wildcard of the entire enterprise, who has apparently decided that time is a suggestion rather than a law and is operating accordingly.

Dan, as he is inexplicably known, is not a drummer in the traditional sense, in that instead of keeping time, he punctuates it. This is an entirely different thing, a Hitherlands-era thing, a thing that the great doom records understood and the lesser ones failed to grasp: that the space between beats is not empty, it is full, it is where the weight lives, it is the geological certainty of the thing, and Dan has access to that geological certainty in a way that most human drummers, however talented, simply do not.

Each hit lands later than expected and heavier than necessary, and the band does not fight this, they lean into it with a collective resignation that becomes, over the course of a track, something approaching ecstasy, guitars bending and hovering and recalibrating in real time, turning what should be a structural flaw into the entire point of the exercise, which is what all great doom metal is actually doing under all that weight.

The roots are clear and worn with pride: early era heavy metal. Riffs that treat gravity as an aesthetic principle rather than a limitation, distortion and silence sharing equal billing in the arrangement because Deep Cuts understand, in their bones, in the very tectonic material Dan is made of, that the silence between the notes is where the damage actually accumulates.

Warg Moon Rising and Marked carry that accumulated damage forward, brute force balanced against something unexpectedly reflective that surfaces in the gaps. Even Sweetleaf, which flirts with looseness, never escapes the band’s core gravitational field: everything is slower than it should be and heavier because of it, and that is not a error, that is the entire beautiful philosophy of the thing.

Live, it is not a set, it is a physical event. You feel each beat deep in your chest before you hear it with your ears. You brace for the impact, and when Dan lands a hit it does not just land, it settles into you the way that sediment finally settles after tumbling through the rapids of a mighty river; the way a truth you have been avoiding settles when you finally stop running from it.

Deep Cuts builds momentum the way glacier accumulates weight, and by the end of the set you are not the same density you were when you walked in, and there is no one to blame but Dan.