This is kind of why Olympic is my favorite metal label right now – the whole "identity is for suckers" trope. Maybe I've been eaten alive by cynicism. How would one know, anyhow? As great as Northern Heritage is, it can't help but to calcify; and whatever Southern Lord's track record, it's going to run out of road shortly after it releases the world's first 148-minute doom-metal treatment of The Music Man. While we doubtless twist the knife that lies in our inner adolescent's corpse by saying this, it is nonetheless true: nature's first and most important law is diversification, without which our vital organs will have been reduced to malfunctioning hothouse flesh-flowers inside of three generations.