Vancouver natives League of Corruption have been around on and off since 2005; remarkably this six-track mini LP bears the first recorded fruit of the band’s intermittent relationship. And quite tasty fruit it is too, in short doses.

There is a sludgy uniformity to the material that means that the songs do tend to run together a bit when played as a whole. However, split up into their constituent parts, there’s actually a lot to enjoy about these Canadian bruisers.

The title track, for instance, is a quite excellent piece of doomy southern metal, crowned by some superb lead playing and a vocal delivery dripping with conviction. Think Down or Kingdom of Sorrow with a slug of Wylde on the side and you’re getting close. Want Me Gone, which features a nice sleazy intro and mid section straight outta the Nuge playbook circa 1978, also scores points for laying off the heaviness for a while to present itself as a more riffy piece of hard rock that breaks things up nicely.

But LoC aren’t a hard rock band at heart – thunderous, doom-laden metal is clearly what they see themselves doing best – and whilst their competence in this area isn’t challenged, their ability to keep things interesting after that first ‘mmm, nice riff’ moment sometimes is. The thing about the greats of this genre of music is that there are always great melodies to be mined even from the heaviest and most unforgiving of coalfaces (look at last year’s comeback album from Exhorder for proof). Perhaps if the band could focus on this area more – last track Where’s Your Savior Now shows that the quartet definitely has it within their grasp to make music that is both very heavy and very melodic, mixing hooky, Judas Priest-style riffs with stentorian but catchy vocals, then a wider audience might be successfully found and converted.

At the end of the day these guys are veterans who know far better than I what they are best at, but with a little tweaking I think they could be on to something majorly listenable.

Something In The Water releases on June 12th.