Blog On The Motorway

For anyone who missed yesterday’s announcement, Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with Diary Of A Ledger, whereby every fortnight one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for, one from a fanboy perspective, the other from a neutral standpoint.  This is the first post, which was an album of my choosing, Blast Tyrant by Clutch.

Clutch are the sort of band who always threaten to be bigger than they actually are.  Having started off as a hardcore band with a bluesy kind of swing to them, over the years they have let the blues seep further and further into their sound. On this, their sixth album, they nailed perfectly the balance between authentic blues riffing and heavy rock swagger.

Opener Mercury kicks things off with a gigantic riff of the type that would make Jimmy Page sit back and whistle through his teeth.  It rumbles on for a minute before the song changes, and in comes the unmistakable voice of Neil Fallon, whose guttural roar permeates the whole album like an extra instrument. Never spilling over into being indecipherable, Fallon manages to have his lyrics easily understood by the listener throughout.

And what lyrics. To my mind Fallon is one of music’s great lyricists, never shying away from big topics but always injecting a sense of delirious humour into proceedings.  He constantly marries surreal imagery to humorous asides.

This is most evident in third song ‘The Mob Goes Wild’ which is ostensibly an anti war song, albeit one which is married to a great big party riff.  But the lyrics manage to paint a picture of exactly what someone going to war can expect, coupled with lines about adjusting his pants ‘So that I may dance the good time dance, and put the onlookers and innocent bystanders into a trance.’

But while the listener can spend hours poring over the lyrics, looking for oblique references to obscure texts, none of this matters without the tunes to back it up, and Blast Tyrant has more cracking tunes on it that one can reasonably expect to hear from most bands over the course of their entire careers. From the stomp and swagger of ‘Promotor (of Earthbound causes)’ to the warm blues of ‘The Regulator’ to the subtle hustle of ‘Subtle Hustle’ every new song washes over you, defying you to stop listening.

As the album starts to wind down, and the moving ‘Eulogy for a Ghost’ washes over you, and the final burst of  ‘(notes from the trial of) La Curandera’ invites you to ‘vote to dunk the witch in the river Styx and photograph the lye, so in the shadow of Cerebus her spirit will reside,’ one cannot help but shake the feeling that you’ve heard one of the last great ‘true’ rock albums.

Free of gimmicks, funny without resorting to cliché and fiercely intelligent, with tunes big enough to steamroller a small village. The only thing to do is to hit play and listen to it all over again, and what more can anyone ask from an album?  It’s truethat Clutch have never really matched the potential of this album, but if every band were able to make one truly great album in their career, then Clutch can argue that theirs is up there with Led Zeppelin 2, Highway to Hell and ‘Black Sabbath’ in the Parthenon of greats. Not many bands can make such a claim.

So there’s my thoughts on this marvellous, wonderful album. Very impartial, I thought. Now go visit Diary Of A Ledger and see what he thought.

Video for Clutch – The Mob Goes Wild