Louisiana Sludge

You're asking about a sound, but it's really a street map. A dozen musicians in New Orleans and the parishes around it swapped instruments across Eyehategod, Crowbar, Down, Soilent Green and Acid Bath until the bands became one organism with different names on the sleeves.

The common language: Sabbath riffs dragged under tempo, feedback left running, a vocal that's closer to a man shouting at the weather than singing.

New Orleans, roughly 1988 to 1998. Eyehategod form at the end of the eighties; Crowbar take that name in mid-1991 after earlier incarnations.

Pepper Keenan formed Down in 1991 with Phil Anselmo of Pantera, Jimmy Bower of Eyehategod, and Kirk Windstein and Todd Strange of Crowbar — the scene literally pooling itself into one band.

Pantera's national platform pulled the whole circle up with it: in 1994 the Pantera video for "I'm Broken" showed Anselmo wearing a Crowbar/Eyehategod T-shirt. Labels were a mix of majors and indies — Century Media for Eyehategod, Pavement Music for Crowbar, who shifted 100,000 copies of the 1993 self-titled, Rotten for Acid Bath out of Houma, Elektra/EastWest for Down.

Within a decade the template had travelled: every slow, filthy band from Savannah to Scandinavia was working from these records.

Who: Mike IX Williams, Jimmy Bower, Kirk Windstein, Pepper Keenan, Phil Anselmo, Dax Riggs, Audie Pitre. Rooms: the Franklin Avenue VFW Hall, Ultrasonic Studios uptown, Side One in Metairie — Eyehategod cut Dopesick at Side One Studios, New Orleans, and Acid Bath cut Kite String at Side One, Metairie.

What: downtuned guitars, no double-kick heroics, feedback treated as a part rather than an accident, Southern rock melody allowed in the back door. How a record gets in: the riff must be slower than you expect, the recording must sound like the room it was made in, and someone on the credits plays in at least two other bands on this list.