Dead Meadow takes a familiar, lead-booted trudge through stoner rock's fugged-up back roads. With its stumbling-mastodon rhythms, seesawing guitar riffs and lost-in-the-cosmos vocals, Shivering King sounds as dense and heavy as the rhetoric and pot smoke at a NORML rally. However, other than a couple of nods to Led Zeppelin-style medieval balladry, Dead Meadow's dirge overkill induces stasis rather than fosters enlightenment. Basically, this disc finds several not-so-eloquent ways to say in song, "Wow, wicked weed, dude." Sorry to harsh your mellow, bro.
