Corrosion of Conformity

Corrosion of Conformity’s 1985 Animosity line-up of Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman, and Reed Mullin made big news when they reunited in 2010 for a two-song EP, Your Tomorrow (Parts 1 and 2), mainly because Animosity‘s punk/thrash crossover made such a monumental contribution to heavy music and because it brought an end to C.O.C.’s five year hiatus after the release of In the Arms of God in 2005.* Of course, it’s the former point that garnered the most excitement, the belief that with Pepper Keenan still toiling away in Down, C.O.C. would lay aside its Southern metal sound and return to its influential, raucous, politico-skate metal roots. Well, gray hairs and lost years be damned because the new full-length, Corrosion of Conformity, finds the Raleigh, North Carolina trio in a fresh, aggressive, and loud way, chucking around thrashy riffs like empty beer cans. I’m sure it was never the band’s intent to recreate Animosity, which they don’t do by a long shot, but what they do do is spread their innate abrasiveness over several well-executed styles of metal to create a rush of dynamic anarchy. From the traditional blast of “Psychic Vampire,” “River of Stone,” and “Your Tomorrow,” to the motor-punk of “Leeches,” “The Moneychangers,” and “Rat City,” to the sludgy doom of “The Doom” and “Newness,” Corrosion of Conformity is utter mosh pit fodder, and Dean’s vocals are perfectly vile for such destructive enthusiasm. You know, it would have been totally reasonable to expect these bastard pioneers to be a bit out of step, but this is so on point that it’s worth your biggest broken-toothed grin…and a hell of a lot of spins.

*Even though it was the last recorded C.O.C. album, Mullin actually wasn’t part of the In the Arms of God line-up. In fact, that last time this trio appeared on an album together was 2000′s America’s Volume Dealer. However, Mullin and Dean do have another band called Righteous Fool.

Listen to “The Doom” from Corrosion of Conformity!

Orange Goblin

If you’ve got a beard, own a bong, or ride a bike, chances are this year’s most anticipated release for you is Orange Goblin’s A Eulogy for the Damned. And why not? The band released its first six albums in ten years, and its now been damn near five years since 2007′s Healing Through Fire, so chances are you’ve got one hell of an itch to take to the starry highway to hit up OG’s cosmic dope show once again. But where the UK quartet was once raw and bloozy it is now cooked and mean, and the smoky caravan kitsch it once proudly boasted in its space-brewed riffs has given way to a prouder, louder form. In fact, aside from vocalist Ben Ward’s chain-link preaching, the Southern boogie doom of “Save Me From Myself” or the bold groove of “Return to Mars,” there’s very little left in the way of OG’s former scuzzy self, and what stands before you today is a tyrant fifteen stories tall, an angry world-eater with a heavy metal law to lay the fuck down. And this is a metal album in many ways thanks to songs like “Red Tide Rising,” “Acid Trial,” “The Fog,” “Death of Aquarius,” and “Bishop’s Wolf,” which is not something you could have really said about any past OG album. It is also very much a statement album, the aforementioned songs leaving the deepest cut, but even OG’s familiar stoner rock fare, like the melodic “Stand For Something” and “The Filthy and the Few” contain a demented edge to ‘em, and the acoustic-psych intro on closer “A Eulogy To The Damned” points to OG’s dark, force-fueled approach to making this record. If you’ve ever hoped that Orange Goblin would one day step up and make a power move, that they’d drop all that whiskey-soaked astro-noodling and put some steel and muscle into their tunes, A Eulogy for the Damned is your hope come true.

Listen to “Red Tide Rising” from A Eulogy for the Damned!

Dwellers

Well, it turns out that Peace, and Other Horrors, the four-song EP Dwellers put out last year, was an experimental little project because there’s not much folksy, acoustic Americana Gothic to be found on their debut full-length, Good Morning Harakiri. Although, to be fair, Good Morning Harakiri does contain a good deal of slide guitar, but it’s used as a vehicle for delivering some grungy psych-blues instead. I suppose the idea behind this one is that the six songs included here are the musical equivalent of splitting yourself open and spilling your guts all over the place, and if that’s the case, this Salt Lake City trio (comprised of Iota and Subrosa members) has made one fine mess. While it is atmospheric, exotic, and trippy at times, Good Morning Harakiri is, ultimately, blessedly doomed, absolutely heavy, and full of Southern-fried muscle, and if Gideon Smith was to ever rip through a set of songs from Soundgarden’s Ultramega OK in Earth’s jam room, this is what it would sound like. Forget what it does to your insides — this ritual rock rattles your goddamn bones.

Listen to “Lightening Ritual” from Good Morning Harakiri!

Infernal Overdrive

Discovering that Boston hero* Marc Schleicher has surfaced as the front man for New Jersey rock n’ road warriors Infernal Overdrive is one hell of an early Christmas present, my friends. Hell, I’m not sure I’d be here today if it wasn’t for Schleicher’s brawlin’ brand of East Coast riff n’ roll, so to hear him once again stranglin’ the six-string like a twenty dollar hooker is something special; a sure sign that the wheel of the American rawk machine is back in the grip of one of its most prolific drivers. Last Rays of the Dying Sun, the band’s full-length debut, is, quite simply, arena rock for dive bars, like KISS or Cheap Trick on a chain link tour through Southern wilds, and the way they saturate it with razor-backed hooks, sky high solos, nasty drum fills, and blacktop lingo (“I-95,” “Electric Street Cred,” “Rip It Out,” “Motor”) will lead a man to submit himself to a life of drinkin’, cheatin’, lyin’, and dyin’. Or, if you prefer, a life of glory. You know, I don’t think this one actually comes out until 2012, but either way, Small Stone has finished this year off — or started the next — on a definite high note.

*I’m not from Boston, but I have spent many years there vicariously through people much cooler than me, and I would be utterly shocked to find out that anyone who played in Cracktorch, Antler, and Quintain Americana isn’t a hero in that town.

Listen to “Rip It Out” from Last Rays of the Dying Sun!

The Heavy Eyes

Full-on Delta doom from these Heavy Eyes, whose debut full-length is dripping with enough Southern cough syrup to make you forget you’re listening to a stoner rock record. Between the tumbleweed riffs of songs like “Wax Apple” and “Where is Wilder” to the Memphis medicine of songs like “Iron Giants” and “It’s Been So long,” Heavy Eyes slides on through the smoke and takes a midnight sail down the winding river of groove. Of course, this is a stoner rock record, a real lid-dropper, and the fuzzy psych-blues of songs like “5%,” “Voytek,” and “Supermoon” play right into your floating hand, man. A real solid album, this one, and The Heavy Eyes do awfully well to treat you like the custodial prize in the landmark case of Cactus V. Clutch, presided over by judge Fu Manchu in the court of Sabbath. Hell, you just have to have an affinity for bands with ‘leaf’ in their name, and The Heavy Eyes will do right by you.

Listen to The Heavy Eyes’  Heavy Eyes right here!

Maylene and the Sons of Disaster

I’ve never been able to keep track of Maylene’s line-up from album to album, and, in fact, it looks like there’s a few new beards this time around as well, but what I have been able to keep track of is the Alabama band’s Southern-roasted biker rock, which has always tasted as consistently good as a pig on a spit. The band’s appeal as white trash jug guzzlers has always carried certain weight with me, the inbred rage of album’s I through III irrevocably bad-ass, a lethal mix of metalcore and steel-eyed country power fused by shack burnin’ riffs and shit-drunk hooks. However, it seems as though someone filtered the swamp water Maylene’s been sippin’ for inspiration because with the exception of opening track “In Dead We Dream,” which is as close as the band comes to retaining any ounce of their previous nastiness, IV is — to put it in terms familiar to the band — a disaster. The frothy energy has fizzled out, the dirty heaviness has been cleaned up, and vocalist Dallas Taylor’s maniacal, backwoods barking has been carried away on some cruel prairie wind. In fact, a good deal of IV‘s songs sound like goth-treated modern day Bon Jovi ballads, produced exclusively for radio mediocrity. It ends, as all their albums do, with a back porch sun-downer courtesy of “Drought of ’85″ (that is if you completely disregarding whatever the hell “Off to the Laughing Place” is supposed to be, and I suggest you do), but its predictable reprieve comes much too late. It’s not the biggest disappointment of the year (no one’s going to take that honour away from Black Tide), but instead of tearing my shirt off and wrapping my mouth around an exhaust pipe I’m snacking on an apple and moseying on down the road.

Listen to “In Dead We Dream” from IV!

Diarrhea Planet

With a band name and album cover possibly invented by someone’s seven-year-old nephew, Diarrhea Planet spew forth an album’s worth of Gamblers’ style garage pop as unpredictable and juvenile as their shitty moniker. Driven by a harmonic cacophony of quadruple guitars and tree-fort song titles, this Nashville band riffs on the Southern skate punk sound in equal parts brevity and bravado; the catchy choruses say, ‘Take our songwriting seriously,’ while the lo-fi nonsense says, ‘We’ll place a flaming bag of dog shit on your front step, ring the bell, and take off.’ There is more to Loose Jewels than meets destroys the eye, though, and that’s the slight whiff of leather jacket sleaze that runs down this album’s proverbial leg, which, noted for both its stink and speed, is over and ringing in your ears before the mess even reaches your shoe.

Listen to “Warm Ridin’” from Loose Jewels!

Dixie Witch

This album, Dixie Witch’s fourth, with its gold chrome letters on crushed black leather, is the simplest, most uncomplicated, and appropriately textured statement the band could make concerning their return after a five year absence. As if anticipating the inevitable question, ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ they’ve just gone and shrugged and said, ‘Let it roll, motherfucker!’ With all due respect to the Small Stone bands who’ve already released albums this year, and many condolences to the ones yet to come, this here is the Olympic pinnacle, and the trio of long-toothed Texan troublemakers have stormed Zeus’ Godly realm and confiscated his throne. Armed with an arsenal of lightning bolts and cloaked in the kind of invincibility you can only get from a mountain high, Trinidad Leal, Curt “CC” Christenson, and new guitarist Josh “JT” Todd Smith now seem to hold dominion over all things ROCK; their Southern stoner sound, once drenched in the earthly confines of mud and fuzz, has found a magical, heavenly edge. It’s still every bit the beast Smoke & Mirrors is, but they’ve elevated the power and melody to rocket-fueled levels (and left out the ballads), making Let It Roll as much a supreme n’ sizzling cock rock record as it is a boogie n’ blues truck stop tango drenched in AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, ZZ Top, and Alabama Thunderpussy influences. I suppose Let It Roll has the potential to piss off anyone not enamored with a polished production, but if deliciously dirty dynamics and majestic riffs are your bag, you’re in for one hell of a treat.

Listen to “Let It Roll” from Let It Roll!

Gideon Smith and The Dixie Damned

With one of the most recognizable voices in all of heavy music, the swamp wizard himself, Gideon Smith, returns to howl at the moon with 30 Weight, another album of psychedelic motorcycle blues that has me (and no doubt others of my ilk who have also previously written about The Dixie Damned’s Southern boogie doom) tripping over myself trying to come up with a fresh way to sell the North Carolina band’s super-charmed snake oil. Just like previous full-lengths, 2004′s Southern Gentlemen and 2008′s South Side of the Moon, 30 Weight mixes the spiritual fire-eating of The Cult and the steely-eyed machismo of Circus of Power (see, I’m doing it already) for a deadly concoction of outlaw riffs and acid groove where songs like “Feel Alive” and “Shining Star” are this album’s “Whiskey Devil” and “Shimmering Rain,” respectively. That would also make the song “South” quite self-explanatory, as well. However, Gideon manages to add a few new ingredients to his brew this time around, like a female back-up singer on “Ride With Me” and a couple of covers, including a slow cooked version of Saint Vitus’ “I Bleed Black” and G.G. Allin’s “When I Die,” a poignantly raw country and western song in which Gideon strips it all down, even his voice. While GS&TDD fans will find a familiar comfort in 30 Weight‘s cattle skull savagery, the inexperienced can start here and work their way back down the dusty highway the band has forged without feeling like they’ve arrived late to the midnight ritual dance.

Listen to “Black Fire” from 30 Weight!