Death Songs And Lullabies – Album Review

Lovely Northern gentlemen fresh from a triumphant sort of homecoming at the inaugural Louder Than War all-dayer return with album number 5, a significant upping of the musical stakes. MK Bennett catches up.

All bands should start with a wonderful name and work forward from there. Evil Blizzard has a perfect name, suggestive of one of Dario Argento’s Giallo movies from the 70s, a bloodthirsty operatic spectacle enacted in the snow. It gives them an enormous amount of space within the aesthetic and gives very little away in terms of what they actually sound like. That, though, is a wonderland in itself. Bands with massed influences can sound untethered and disparate, pulled into different directions that cannot work, but not these fellas, who manage to coagulate perfectly, letting the song dictate.

The thing about a band clearly in love with music is that you cannot pin them down, box them in, or decipher an easy genre for them to fit into. Off With Their Heads is Krautrock via Bontempi, but arguably even better than that sounds. It starts with the pitter-patter of synthetic drums and builds towards a climax of motorik splendour, while simultaneously sending out signals to Underworld and Hawkwind, somehow. It is a mighty opener that also recalls that brief moment in time ( Vanishing Point, to be specific ), when Primal Scream were cool and being remixed by the guy in the cardigan from My Bloody Valentine. Picture yourself in a venue with this coming from an overloaded PA system, and you’ll smile yourself into stupidity. Down Down Down is a beautifully 70s chug along with a sinister face and an immediacy that’s striking in an era of the overly programmed. Organic, bucolic, euphoric, and a set phasers to stun riff with a sound that could stun wildlife.

The aesthetic of the masks, a sort of Lancashire Slipknot where the cheapness adds to the distress – and the effect – and the Hammer house is always next door, is the perfect vehicle to display themselves to the world. Deadly serious and seriously theatrical, it gives them the latitude to do and say and create whatever they like. This freedom is wonderfully exploited; the music never settles, never sits still, a hyperactive child exploring corners ignored by others and always finding treasure buried in the dirt.

Black Square is the sound of Andrew Weatherall busking in a church with Benedictine monks before Amon Duul and Can turn up to the party. It builds into a magnificent & joyful noise, part Glaswegian cellar, part Palm desert generator party. Their ability to lock into something and move within it is deeply impressive, while the bass, through a decent set of sub-woofers is deep like the Mariana Trench is deep. The shapeshifting uncoils and returns to the beginning wonderfully. You can only assume they finish their set on this song; it is a crime if they do not.

Wake The Dead In Bedlam, where they are joined by Discharge man Jeff “JJ” Janiak, is necessarily less of an assault on the nervous system and more 80s Sabbath, with added dystopian melody and a vocal that naturally drags it away kicking and screaming from basic metal or rock. They are part of a collective of UK bands ( Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, for example ), who have all the elements of metal, yet somehow remain resolutely unmetal like Pyrite, but this is far from Fools Gold, it’s a slick space age machine. Maybe it’s a punk sensibility, a down to earth demeanor that allows them to take the music seriously but never themselves, but some sort of osmosis never lets it become po-faced or self-serving. Questions is another epic, clearly their forte, it simply allows them time to unravel knowingly. As close to the genius of Jane’s Addiction’s Three Days as any human could reasonably manage and likely to be one of the songs of the year, the bass led intro and verse eventually kicks into an ineffably heavy and magnificent wah-wah drenched riff so stupendous you’ll need a psychiatrist’s couch and some strong medication immediately afterwards. If these fuckers were American, they’d be lauded to the hills. Breathtaking.

Four Letter Words literally kicks in next, an initially brutal blast of old school British hardcore punk hinging on yet another fantastic riff; it never really slows down to take in the scenery, but is reminiscent of Overkill-era Motorhead, all velocity and spite. A Perfect palate cleanser and possibly not safe for work, unless you drive a tank for a living. 71 seconds of majesty. Hater Creator is unadulterated and bone clean stoner rock. Adjacent to the sadly defunct Orange Goblin or the sludge with edge of the Melvins, it wouldn’t be out of place at Desertfest OR Supersonic, a niche that few can fill or meet. Again, that element of theatricality helps cross over to other realms, similar to say, Witch Club Satan in their ability to have fingers in pies.

Finally, Warpaint is a doom infused crawl through various hellscapes, a horror show of eroded chords and crumbling ruins, navigated by haunted backing vocals and tribal drums, it is a deliberate ending, the transmission breaking up on re-entry. Acting as a bookend musically and lyrically, it is the most overtly gothic and dramatic, which works perfectly with the atmospheric bleakness of the feedback laced electronica. Manitou era Venom meets The Sisters Of Mercy via early Public Image, the whole thing is a slow walk to Valhalla, a heroic attempt to outrun your gods. The final dying seconds of voice and bass are genuinely moving, the end of a perfectly sequenced, way too short record that deserves a lot more recognition than it will inevitably receive. Still, not all great art is lauded in its lifetime. Sit back, relax and float downstream.

Album of the week, album of the month, album of the whatever. If you have quite reasonably got the post winter, post potential future war blues, then this is the short-term antidote, if not the long term cure. Dive in.

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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram