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Black Elk: Always a six, never a nine
16/04/09 || GardensTale
As a reviewer, you can often make it easy on yourself, especially when you can choose what albums to review. Hey, look a power metal album, let’s nuke it! But every now and then, you just pick a random album to review, and it turns out to be really fucking difficult to review. Guess which one this is, fuckers?
Yeah, Black Elk are an odd breed. The place I got it from described this album with so many different genre tags it stopped making sense halfway through. If I’d have to label it (and because you lazy fuckers insist that I do since music needs labels nowadays) I’d say it’s experimental sludge with influences from hardcore and stoner, among other things. Of course, that doesn’t describe shit either. Fuck it. I heard a lot of reviewers say there’s math rock in there too, but as far as I know, just playing 5/4th does not make it math rock or math metal. So fuck that.
All in all, the music sounds mentally unhinged, dirty and sort of hypnotic in a strange way. The guitars are distorted, often going into full reverb noise just for kicks. There’s a very thick layer of bass beneath, which is thank god very audible thanks to the good production. Good as in, it sounds the way it should, a bit gritty but with all instruments very audible instead of resorting to vacuum cleaner noises. Top of the bill are the vocals, which sound like a maniacal offspring of Lemmy and Ozzy. Enter mental pictures.
The songwriting is pretty solid as well. Playing a bit with odd tempos like the aforementioned 5/4 and thereabouts, enough hooks to keep you interested on first listens and sounding nicely insane just the way we like it. The aforementioned hardcore influences are mostly audible on slammy parts like on “Hospital”, and the stoner influences are most clearly heard on “She pulled machete”. These two tracks are, by the way, the best of the album, with the former using a very catchy lead line switching to aggressive outbursts, and the latter sounding very threatening and dark.
It doesn’t always work, though. The opener lacks a good line to latch onto and becomes a bit of a jumbled mess, and the end of the album repeats the same riff so often it becomes exhausting about a minute before the song is out. I guess you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
Fortunately, very few eggs get broken all in all, and Black Elk have managed to make a very solid album that makes you utterly uncomfortable but keeps you coming back anyway. I guess it appeals to the madman in all of us.
8 mental pictures of Lemmy and Ozzy making babies out of 10.
- Information
- Released: 2008
- Label: Crucial Blast
- Website: www.blackelk.net
- Band
- Tom Glose: vocals
- Erik Trammell: guitars
- Jeff Watson: drums
- Don Capuano: bass
- Tracklist
- 01. My last shred of decency
- 02. Hospital
- 03. Pig crazy
- 04. The brazen bull III
- 05. Stab
- 06. She pulled machete
- 07. Brine
- 08. The brazen bull II
- 09. Hold my hand
- 10. Winter formal
