Fashion might be a fickle beast, but it's very quickly clear that West Virginian stoner quartet Clutch care little for courting it. In fact, by the vicious, gutteral and defiantly retrogressive sound of their fourth album Pure Rock Fury, they're far more likely to be found hunting down the tastemakers with a lasso and a double-barreled shotgun. Still, this time, it seems that fashion may have caught up with them. Recorded in a year defined best by the narco-pop grizzle of the Black Crowes and the canyon-deep bass grooves of Queens Of The Stone Age, these thirteen tracks of shrieking, strangulated fuzz guitar and juggernaut-heavy riffing sound as vital as the title suggests; think Led Zeppelin's II, rewired through the monolithic speaker-stacks of desert-rock innovators Kyuss. That Pure Rock Fury should seem such a landmark is certainly in part due to the line-up of eager special guests: Scott Weinrich, guitar hero for stoner-rock heavy hitters Spirit Caravan, and Maryland's retro-delic guitar mystics Sixty Watt Shaman. But when Clutch hit their stride, it's clearly their game alone; the snatches of live performance that scatter Pure Rock Fury culminate in the staggering shape of 1995 classic "Spacegrass", a reverie of shamanic hippy-talk and frenzied, shrieking drug psychosis. This will surely elevate Clutch to the stoner superleague. --Louis Pattison