Album Review: Drawers - All Is One

The sheer volume of music out there, divided into a plethora of disparate genres and subgenres, never ceases to amaze me. As lovers of the art form we are all sweeping our musical metal detectors across these heaving, sonic haystacks, searching for the tiny needles in each that prick our attention. The idea, of course, is that we collect enough needles from enough haystacks to satiate our own desire. As we grab our needles to knit our own musical sweater, it’s so easy to forget the vast weight of bands we either fail to pick-up on, or do so and discard.

Drawers are a band who, amidst the trend for those one-word, pluralised bandnames and the resurgent craze for atmospherics and big riffs, are in danger of not getting picked up. It’s clear from, “All Is One”, their debut album about a sailor’s journey to meet his nemesis, that the band have sucked up many different flavours of sludge and stoner metal to produce a hard, smothering sound that’s heavy enough to suffocate.

They start aggressively with both “Capuut Mortem Ocean” and “Black Queen” ripped with the grumbling guitar tone of High On Fire and enamoured with a touch of the dark power of Purified In Blood. “Grey Sailor” piles some of Corrosion Of Conformity’s hardcore feistiness into the mix, dissecting the rhythmic groove into spasming sections. Mostly though, you’ll be hearing plenty of the low-keyed progressive fury of Crowbar and Down, especially in tracks like “Ivory Lighthouse”, “Red Ballet” and “Muddy Smoke”, both in the Anselmo meets Windstein vocal and the weight of dissonance, dissolving the chugs into a singular sound.

Tracks like the short-but-sweet “Blue Keel” and the more expansive “Silver Hand” dig down into cleaner waters adding another brief layer with a more pinched, proggy quality a la Baroness or Isis. “Silver Hand”, in particular, is a winner having retained the driven punch built up from previous tracks to offer a taste of both worlds. Another cracker is the raw power-play, “Golden Adieu”, which simply refuses to cede ground to allow you room to breathe.

With quite a few recognisable influences up front and centre, the task of projecting their own stamp on the project becomes increasingly more important as the tracks roll by. Sadly, by “Purple Ride” and “Electric Seat”, Drawers have succumbed to towing the stoner metal line, mimicking Down almost to the last detail in an attempt to suck up some of their signature, grime-slicked, deep Southern groove, wobbling along the same path, facetiously mimicking their bow-legged gait.

It’s odd that an album whose song-titles feature an array of colours should seem so undeviating, but it’s an album that undoubtedly has an enormous heft to it. It’s for this reason that, despite its lack of variety and tendency to copycat, fans of any of the aforementioned bands should get a kick out of this. For the rest of you, as it stands, if your detector gets one whiff of these Frenchmen right now, it will simply short-circuit and Drawers will find themselves sliding back down to the bottom of that haystack.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2012/02/drawers-all-is-one-slow-burn-records/

Album Review: Corrosion Of Conformity - Corrosion Of Conformity

Pepper Keenan is another of those men with fingers in pies. If Down were the apple of his eye, then Corrosion Of Conformity would be his sweet, sweet potato. His determined commitment to one or the other inevitably leads to a clash of interests and, sadly, this self-titled album is missing his influence. Despite rumors to the contrary, the band have finally buckled after one too many album-less years and forged ahead to create a new opus as just a three-piece, with Mike Dean leading the charge on vocals. As a kind of makeweight, it’s a thrill to see drummer Reed Mullin back on board, so recreating the line-up that produced the band’s breakthrough album, Animosity.

If you follow the band’s timeline and line-up changes, it was inevitable that this release was always going to be a return to the days before Keenan helped tweak their sound. So it is that much has changed, one of the agitators being the harsher recording which has been stripped back to the barest of bones. However, what this shift of stance has done is kickstart that 80s punk/hardcore vibe which so set fire to their early career; back when their albums bulged with virile, feisty ragers that gobbed in your face. The trio have also found time to chuck in a 70s rock n’ roll vibe to boot, perfect fodder for Woody Weatherman’s hungry guitar, until they’ve reached, by hook or by crook, the crossroads where Terror meets Voivod via Orange Goblin, Black Sabbath, Saviours and Wolfmother. Yep, try sticking that lot on at once and see what you get.

For the old school metal warrior with a penchant for retrospection, this self-titled will be like being wonderfully dragged back in time. The flurry of hardcore aggression that crawls over “Leeches” and the snot-smeared punk attitude of “Psychic Vampire”, “River Of Stone” and “Rat City” (God only knows why Tenacious D’s “Car Chase City” keeps coming to mind when I hear this) properly kick out the jams to connect with the spirit of those early COC albums. Dean’s reverb-soaked vocal goes on to peak at cosmic levels for “Your Tomorrow” before reaching a disengaged, querulous low during “What You Despise Is What You Have Become”. It’s all an experience that may prove a little confusing for those newcomers to the band. Fear ye not though, my stoner friends, for there are still little moments of bliss to be found – here, within the wallowing, mellow blues of “The Doom”, then here, following the curiously Soundgarden-like swagger of “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here” (where Dean summons some fiery Cornell passion into his aging vocal cords), and here, attached to the luxuriant, twangy instrumental of “El Lamento De Las Cabras”.

Try comparing their last release and my personal favorite, 2005′s In The Arms Of God, with this collection though, and the whole charade begins to fall apart. Dean’s sharper, less-attractive howl is a tough thing to accept when you consider what might have been. That hole left by Keenan’s linear guitar skills and deep, throaty power (the perfect accompaniment to the band’s more recent shift to breathing forth heavy-lidded, dirty blues and gurgling psych soliloquies) is gaping. It’s all to do with personal taste, of course, but Keenan just seems the far stronger singer, even when it comes to smashing up the neighborhood and breaking the speed limit. With Dean dredging the music of times past, this just feels so… dated.

So it seems, then, that your level of enjoyment is probably going to be dictated by when you first fell in love with Corrosion Of Conformity. If you’re someone who prefers a dash of Pepper with your chow, then this crackerjack-strewn skid-pan might be a bit too much to stomach. However, if you’re a fan of that early-COC punch, then this will be exactly that, a shot in the arm.

Also online @ The NewReview = http://thenewreview.net/reviews/corrosion-of-conformity-corrosion-of-conformity