The sun rises, the sun sets; the tides ebb and flow. Like death and taxes, some things are inevitable – and inevitably reliable. Along those lines, you can always rely on Crowbar‘s Kirk Windstein to bring a 55-gallon drum of sludge to anything he touches. Is that reliability a help or hindrance for their 12th album? Let’s all don our favorite mud-covered coveralls and dive into the toxic muck, y’all.
I confess that I was not nearly so interested in Crowbar when they first crossed my path in the mid-90s. Their brand of Grade-A Prime slow-ass sludge metal was pretty much the antithesis of the speedy thrash and death metal that was filling my ears and pumping my veins back then. “This…, this just isn’t very fun to listen to,” a 22 year old dumb-ass me said back in the day.
But I slowly came around about ten years later (~2005?), when the impossibly crushingly awesome “Planets Collide” literally collided with my music bubble and burst it into a thousand-and-one shards. My exact words were “Holy fuck!”.
Since that time, I’ve kept an eye-and-an-ear open on what Kirk Windstein and his Bar of Crows have been up to over the years. Their aural tales of utter misery and woe with at times dirge-like BPMs were most especially poignant when paired to the imagery that came out of their New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina (2005). My exploration of Sludge Metal branched out from there.
But over time, my taste for the utter soul-crushing misery soured a bit. Real life getting real, know what I mean? We have a worldwide plague that’s not going away anytime soon, open warfare in Eastern Europe, genocide in Africa and Asia, worldwide human trafficking and enslavement on the rise, fascist extremism now somehow deemed acceptable by fucking morons, and so on. Do we need music that depresses the soul in an already pretty depressing world? For some folks, it’s cathartic. For me? Mmm…, maybe kinda sorta sometimes?
I guess that is why I think the strongest tracks are the ones that don’t just depressingly muck about in the sludge gutter, but actually have a little bit of saucy groovy tang to them and mix up the BPM a tad. Crowbar always front-loads their albums with a killer opening track: for this album “The Fear That Binds You” fits this to a tee. “Bleeding From Every Hole” has plenty of chuggy riffery to get your head a’nodding (and check out the rather nasty video, too). Even when the moments where the sludge knob is cranked to maximum sludge (e.g. “Chemical Godz”), the underlying groove is still appealing enough to not necessarily drag you down into various pits of utter despair.
Does listening to ugly music make an ugly world any better? In the grand scheme of things, I’d say “sometimes?”. This is not going to win over folks that aren’t into this sort of thing — and conversely it’s not going to annoy folks that are certified sludge-o’philes. There’s nothing here that makes me say “Holy fuck!”, but I’m digging this.
Crowbar is inevitably reliable, and this album reliably delivers the sludge you’ve been hankering for.