As it turns out, the levees bust long before Katrina. In the ’80s and ’90s, New Orleans birthed musical lineage that would trouble the secretive and rule the world. Detuned and devastating, they rise from the swamp and from the amplifier of men who knelt at the altar of The Almighty Riff. Who toiled in their Immix studies and cultured those training as if their lives depended upon them. They colonized and propagated the pedigrees that brought you the dope-pale sludge of Eyehategod, the residue-block destiny of Crowbar, the brash Southern cross of deterioration of compliance and the platinum power-groove of Pantera that would be Jimmy Bower, Kirk Wind stein, Pepper Keenan, Rex Brown and Philip Anselmo, more or less.

For a state of mind be set on all sides by too much indifferent water, too many pills, hardly enough tidy and never enough Black Sabbath. Yeah, it might seem like the only way you could draw a straight line between the developed wasteland of Birmingham, England birthplace of Sabbath to the rotten cultural potage of the Big Easy would be with a pencil and a ruler, but that isn’t inevitably the case. At least not since DOWN have been around, which by all accounts dates back to 1991, when then-Pantera frontman Phil Anselmo and deterioration of orthodoxy front man Pepper Keenan would trade tapes and listen to the doom-ridden prophecy of specialized Sabbath heads like Saint Vitas and Trouble as well as Pentagram. Therein lays the origins of DOWN, the eternal brotherhood into which Bower, Wind stein and Brown were later initiated.