Scores of the undead have taken over cities and villages across the land during the zombie apocalypse. Rusted, mud-caked Harleys roar through the Mohave Desert, spinning up plumes of dust in their wake. There’s one destination they’re headed to: a lone establishment, an oasis among the stark brown landscape.

Inside, these living dead bastards, their thin, rotting frames clothed in ripped and faded Acid Bath T-shirts and black leather jackets with pentagrams plastered on the back, knock back shots of Wild Turkey and guzzle that good ol’ American bottled goat piss known as Budweiser.

Indeed, Behold! The Monolith, the stoner/doom metal trio from Los Angeles, are the perfect house band in a biker bar situated in such catastrophic badlands where the only inhabitants are the brain-munching living dead; a world where the Hell’s Angels truly are hell’s angels.

Defender, Redeemist is their second full-length album, continuing lyrical topics such as epic blood-drenched, good-versus-evil battles. Building on their self-titled full-length debut, Behold! The Monolith have incorporated more ambient passages and intricate melodies into this disc with surprising success.

The intro, “Guardian’s Procession,” is a brief, sludgy, trumpet blast announcing the impending doom of what’s to come. The Dragonforce-on-quaaludes instrumental track soon gives way to the straight-ahead, slap-those-chastity-belts-on-your-wife-and-daughter infernal “Halv King.” The decaying skulls of undead motherfuckers still listening in front of the stage at this point are bound to spontaneously burst like pus-filled piñatas. The next track, “Desolizator,” a brutal skull-smasher of a tune, starts off with a riff that’s reminiscent of Hell Awaits-era Slayer. What I initially thought was the next, more doom-laden track happened to be the last half of “Desolizator” instead. In a way it foreshadows the diverse sections of “Cast on the Black/Lamentor/Guided by the Southern Cross.” I was definitely hypnotized, and B!TM weren’t about to release its iron grip on my balls.

If Lemmy attended a séance and a pagan ancestor of Celtic Frost’s Tom Gabriel Warrior possessed his body, mixing its haunting growls with Lemmy’s wailing in an unholy fusion, it would sound like Kevin McDade who also handles bass duties. The lineup is rounded out with Matt Price on guitars and Chase Manhattan on drums.

Kevin’s vocals range from booze-drenched screams to death metal growls a la Deicide’s Glen Benton to blackened rasps. Not that true fans of B!TM would notice or anything; they’d be too busy bashing their craniums together like rabid pachycephalosaurs or fucking inanimate objects out of pure adrenaline.

On “Witch Hunt Supreme,” the track chugs along at such a snail’s pace that at one point it seems as if the guys are performing in a grimy pool of molasses. The song is barely kept from flatlining by the lone rumbling bass line toward the end, a slimy, vibrating umbilical cord that keeps the struggling fetus connected to its crack whore mother.

“We are the Worm” is a riff-driven, heavy piece of muck. A hidden gem, it’s easily one of my favorites and the most memorable tune on the album.

The nearly 14-minute epic “Cast on the Black/Lamentor/Guided by the Southern Cross” may appear to be a patchwork medley when one is perusing the track list. However, it’s actually more like an orchestral arrangement in three movements, reminding me of the Melvins’ eponymous album (a possible Billy Anderson production connection?). I found my ADD kicking in a bit during the acoustic “Lamentor” part of the track, though, but I snapped out of it once the sludge started spewing forth again.

“Redeemist” begins with a post-apocalyptic soundscape before the thick bass and drums, sounding like machinery pumping along in a sewage-treatment facility, enter the fold. The brief acoustic insertion near the end of the 11-minute track is a pleasant surprise, not to mention the startling appearance of Ozzy’s “Planet Caravan”-type vocals at the end.

On the whiplash-inducing closer, “Bull Colossi,” just when you think the rhythm section will keep chugging along, the heartbeat finally stops and the guitars drift away like the final notes of a funeral dirge, an appropriate ending to such an amazing, complex album.

Behold! The Monolith’s Defender, Redeemist builds on the cement foundation of Sleep and Electric Wizard while using lumber coated with Mastodon and Baroness. The reinforced finished product, however, is pure B!TM: a small but heavily-fortified structure with a touch of progressive and ambient accents in the middle of a barren Mad Max wasteland. And, wouldn’t you know it, the sonic rumbling even annihilated all those God-forsaken zombies.

4.5/5