When one thinks of heavy, thick and driving music, one's thoughts inevitably turn to the heavyweights of active music, Crowbar. Formed years ago on the bayous of New Orleans, this imposing quartet have managed to create worldwide acclaim through powerful releases and equally massive amounts of touring, not to mention feature video clips on cult-followed programs such as Beavis & Butthead.

This highly anticipated release was charted in the top 5 at metal radio and received the strongest reviews of the bands career.Black clouds, hot sheets of wind, electricity in the air, destruction at hand. Hurricane season in The Big Easy? Not quite. It's actually Crowbar, native sons of NOLA, respected deliverers of deliverance, preparing to pound the coast (and indeed all the coasts) with a new slab of metal anguish called Equilibrium. Co-creators of a tight-knit and respected metal scene that includes Corrosion Of Conformity, Eyehategod, Acid Bath, Soilent Green, Down and Pantera's Phil Anselmo, Crowbar have been a ten-year testimony to the core tenets of the NOLA sound, a horrific mixture of English doom and swamp-monster sludge, creeping towards slo-mo hardcore in their middle years, but never giving up the surging but deliberate power and insight that distinguished early records like '92's Obedience Through Suffering and '93's Crowbar.

Now a decade later, with five studio albums and two compilations under their heaving belts, the band are set to deliver Equilibrium, an intelligent, textured piece of work that expands upon the dark melodic complexity of '98's Odd Fellows Rest. Slightly more ornate, and slightly more reverent of true spiritual doom (think Sabbath, Trouble, Cathedral), Equilibrium is a masterwork of cosmic depression. But out of the dark, Kirk shines the light. "A lot of kids write in and people talk to me, telling me how much they love the lyrics, and I appreciate it. Theme-wise, we have no fictional songs whatsoever. We've never written about anything other than what reality is to us. It's just about life's ups and downs, finding strength through hard times. I think a lot of people can identify. A lot of the songs will mean one thing to me, and someone else will read it, and see something totally different, but they can still find something positive in it." "It may sound odd, but the lyrics happen the day I decide to track the vocals," reveals Kirk, somewhat shockingly. "We do all the music first, and when everything is done, I just go in, sit down with a notebook, and whatever comes off the top of my head, whatever mood I'm in that day, whatever I am feeling, I write down. Then I go in and come up with a melody, and sing it right on the spot."

Kirk confirms the band's newfound sense of musical adventure, a creative work ethic that has resulted in songs that roll with a majesty and authority that packs a seriousness not found within other NOLA sound bands. "Odd Fellows Rest was a big transition for us in a positive way. I guess we just got to the point where we had to go one way or the other, and this album is just a continuation of the direction of that album. Basically, when we started out, the whole idea of the band was to be as heavy as we could, but play slower songs with melody, in direct opposition to most of the bands who were doing faster, technical thrash. And for whatever reason, we put up certain barriers and were afraid to move past the initial idea of what the band was. We'd write songs and say, 'we can't use this, it's too wimpy, it doesn't sound like Crowbar.' And when we got older, we felt like 'screw that, why not just go for it?' By no means did we try to write anything commercial. It's just that we brought in more melody, especially into the vocals, where originally it was more aggressive, hardcore vocals. And song-wise, we used to just take a bunch of riffs and glue them together and call them a song, and now we're trying to actually write songs and the whole vibe is really progressing."

Swamp-livin' second guitarist Sammy, who cut his teeth with the legendary and sadly missed Acid Bath, confirms that the band has reached deep into the muck of the past, and sludged forward at the same time. "Actually, there aren't that many adjustments from the last one. But in a way it's going back to the roots of Crowbar, more like the doomy, slow, crunchy-style, New Orleans sound, with a few more experimental things we found through jamming. It's a mixture of everything this time around. We've combined the old Crowbar sound with the last album's sound." "I guess you could say the riffs are a little busier," adds Sammy, "more things going on within them, more movement on the fretboard. Not so simple, but simple sounding, you know?

The riffs I was writing in Acid Bath were busier than what Kirk was used to with Crowbar, and I guess some of that old kind of fever came in when I was actually writing with him, you know (laughs)?"

Equilibrium's smothering weight is undeniably prime Crowbar, offering wide panoramic grooves filled with truckloads of rumbling guitars. It is a sound that has been piled on through the band's relationship with Keith Falgout and Festival Studios in hometown New Orleans.

"We basically felt that with the last record we had a winning combination with Keith, "explains Kirk. "He is a producer, but he acts just as much as engineer, and him and I together co-produced the album. We work together really well, and he comes up with a lot of good ideas."Kirk talks a bit about the studio work. "We did some different stuff with the guitar. I used a talk box on 'Command Of Myself' and I sang through a Leslie cabinet on a couple of songs. In the past everything was a 3 1/2 minute song, no effects, no guitar effects, no vocal effects. Boom.

Go to the next song. And now I think we've branched out and popped a few surprises here and there with different tunings, different tempos, more complicated vocal melodies." The results can be felt on tracks like 'I Feel The Burning Sun', 'Buried Once Again' and 'Uncovering' which find Crowbar deaf, dumb and blind with depressive metal, Kirk adding searing and scarring dimensions to his vocals that are the perfect emotive balm to the crashing waves of traditional timeless metal composed around his presence. It's a whirlwind tour of choice dark musics, touchstones like Type O Negative, My Dying Bride, and even Pink Floyd coming to mind, all getting a reverential nod within the large and looming framework that is this unique hard music resource.

But it's not all thud, release, then thud again. 'To Touch The Hand Of God' features a sobbing, monk-like vocal from Kirk, simple piano from new drummer (and writer of the track) Sid Montz, and a backing track of torrential rain. Kirk explains: "That one is about dying, and given the arrangement, it has a really spiritual feel to it. It was written as a segue, Sabbath-style. Sid plays the piano really good, and we thought instead of trying to do a guitar segue, why don't we have something on piano? So he came up with the beginning part and then he ended on this one chord, and I said, 'you know what? If you had just one more chord to it, then I could do vocals on it,' which is how it became a song." Sammy reacts to the track. "I thought it was actually very, very cool that we have that on there. It shows us not being stuck in a rut, Crowbar just pounding away, 24-7. The piano thing is a step forward, quite an accomplishment for us to get away with it without being shot down or called sellouts. I thought it was really cool the first time I heard it. I was extremely surprised."

Second surprise is the band's caustic, collapsed, and triumphantly successful cover of Gary Wright's 'Dream Weaver', probably the last song that one would think fits the Crowbar canon. "It's always been a song I liked a lot," reveals Kirk. "I always thought it was a killer song, but the chorus was so happy and upbeat. But the first night when we were tracking everything, Keith said dude, why don't you try 'Dream Weaver', and I said 'the chorus is just too damn happy sounding.' So we just kind of rewrote the chorus in this descending kind of doomy pattern, with different drums and different guitars, instead of this upbeat major key thing. But I sang it the same way. We never rehearsed it, sticks and we just went for it. We just played and gave signals to each other. I was drunk by that time, it was late at night, two or three in the morning, and we ended up doing the whole song that night. I couldn't even remember the lyrics. We just laid everything down and we listened back and we were just laughing because it was just a big joke, and then we started going, 'this is actually pretty killer.' So we just decided to stick it on the record to see what kind of reaction we got, which has been pretty good. Even Phil (Anselmo, from Pantera) was like, 'what the fuck are you doing?' And then I played it for him, and he said, 'dude, you actually pulled it off.'" It's a fitting close to a record of apocalyptic, wide-angled sludge, synths and guitars mind-melding in a psychedelic swirl to the finish, Kirk delivering an echoed treatment of one of the clearest vocals he's ever cut.

Touring for Equilibrium will of course be heavy, as heavy as the dents Crowbar has inflicted upon the psyches of tens of thousands of fans the world over. Kirk has found a way to turn personal pain, and the pain of his many friends within the tight New Orleans scene, into a mantra of spiritual redemption through the catharsis of volume. Plug into Equilibrium and feel that calming electric surge for yourself.