Yeah, yeah…I know I’m late with this one by a bunch of months, but I figure I better catch up on all the stuff I missed throughout the year before it’s too late. In fact, most of the reviews from this point forward until the end of the year will probably concern albums that have been out for awhile that, for one reason or another, I never got around to attacking when it mattered. Cue Providence, Rhode Island’s Howl, another big, fat pack of flesh-eating rats in Relapse’s verminous army, which means they’ve got the disease n’ doom down pat. Their debut, Full of Hell, is just that, teeming with ambitiously black riffs and emitting a world-eating belch with the heaviest, most foul stench. True, there’s not much musically that separates the nine songs here, but that hardly matters when they take on this kind of sludge metal groove, chugging and rolling like a mean-ass motherfucker with blood on his boots. An impressively boss full-length debut, and bonus points for the epic Ryan Begley cover art.
You should see it around here, man. It’s all exploding hearts and raging boners and hot sparks, which kind of sounds like a sweaty Saturday night at the steel mill, but really it’s just me on cloud nine in the rock n’ roll sky that opened up above me the second I dropped the needle on this glorious slab of coke bottle clear wax. A new C’mon record can, without much effort at all, make your entire life worth living, so the fact that it’s been three years since their last full-length, Bottled Lightning of an All Time High, means we’ve been comatose for quite awhile now. But here comes our heroic power trio, Sir Ian Blurton, Katie Lynn Campbell, and Dean Dallas Bentley, riding in on this pale horse to save the fucking day, to shock us back into coherence with their brilliantly boss fuzz n’ roll. Beyond the Pale Horse, then, is like a shot of adrenaline right into your balls, like most C’mon albums are, naturally, and like previous albums, its beauty lies in its beastly nature, its ability to shift and deviate while still remaining furiously savage. The play this time is that the electric noise is saturated in dreamy effects, and C’mon mixes some foggy, psychedelic magic in amongst their usual motor-driven madness. Dig the catchy title track and the majestically groovy – and unusually long – “Fortress of the Night” for the freakiest examples. But for sheer riffola, “Midnite is the Answer,” with its stoner crunch, is the one that pumps my blood. C’mon prove, once again, that they are almighty and untouchable.
*That’s not the record I own, but it looks just like it. Courtesy of whomever took the pic. It might’ve been Tony.
Ok, I don’t have an mp3 from the album to share (I just got it in the mail), so go buy the album from Yeah Right! to hear it for yourself. In the meantime, enjoy an older C’mon video of them washing their van and kicking it live!
Ok, so I’m not sure this album is entirely new, but it’s new to me, and as you’re reading this the young Canucks in Black Wizard are putting the finishing touches on the vinyl version, so that’ll be new, got it? And by finishing touches I mean they are silk screening every single goddamn record jacket. That’s instant cred right there, and not just because I have a raging boner for all things rock n’ roll and all things silk screen, but because there’s no doubt that during this awesomely messy DIY process one of ‘em will get ripped to the tits on cheap beer, lose a finger tip in a freak silk screening accident, and bleed all over the freshly painted jackets. I would kill a child with a shoe to get my hands on one of those soiled copies, let me tell you.
Howl
C’mon
Black Wizard