Which is why, after a couple of weeks’ worth of listening, stopping, and listening again, I’m persuaded that Confederacy of Ruined Lives is Eyehategod’s unappreciated masterpiece. While Dopesick features more immediately memorable lyrics (if only because more of them make it into the lyric sleeve: nobody can understand a word this guy’s saying unless the band’s playing live and he’s goading the audience in between songs) and a sort of shock-of-discovery sheen, Confederacy’s got the enlightened savage act down to a science. The pace set by the album-opening “Revelation/Revolution,” for example: picking the album’s come-out roll is an art that hardly anybody masters (most people just pick the single; plenty of labels reserve the right, contractually, to sequence the album themselves with “artist input” as a sort of bone thrown out to quiet the pouting auteur who shouldn’t have signed with a major in the first place), but the blasting-then-rolling drums and the explosion of fudge-thick fuzz drone that heralds the album’s opening is brilliant. It’s brilliant because it takes Eyehategod’s twin influences -- early heavy metal and post-Sex Pistols punk rock -- and melts them together until the point at which one stops and the other starts is invisible. It’s brilliant because it sounds, probably accurately, like just the thing that a bunch of guys from Louisiana who grew up listening to ‘70s stoner metal and early eighties west coast punk rock would naturally want to make, and because it camouflages the self-awareness that the album sleeve (like Dopesick before it, relying heavily on collage and stock images of bondage, surgery, and the Blessed Virgin Mary) and the band’s carefully chosen iconography all proudly indicate. It’s brilliant, I mean, because its own artfulness has succeeded, by the time you hear it, in burying itself. |
| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 [next] |