Grandeur and squalor have a place next to each other. I once saw Wake Up On Fire, a Baltimore crust band, play a local punk house called the Blood Shed. They crammed two drummers and a cellist onto a tiny stage and made a sound vast enough to scare God. I’ve seen precious few arena bands that managed to sound as earthshaking as that band on that night. More than a decade later, many of the same people are now in Nux Vomica, a Portland band whose self-titled album is three sprawling, fiery, majestic 10-minute-plus punk rock symphonies. Nux Vomica pull in black metal majesty and post-punk atmosphere and doom decay. Those things shouldn’t make sense together, but Nux Vomica combine them all into some of the most ambitious, guttural, feverish, powerful basement-punk these ears have ever heard. This is mythic, soul-shaking, world-crumbling thunder, music too huge to belong to any genre or scene. It’s a world of mud, and you can lose yourself in it. –Tom [LISTEN]