2023-08-21 20:12:55
The doomy true crime stoners of Church of Misery still can’t connect – better than on Born Under a Mad Sign but the Japanese haven’t been for a long, long time.
The approximate return to the old form is seven years after And Then There Were None to a large extent with a look at the personal details: bassist and songwriter Tatsu Mikami is now the only remaining founding member of the band, for which he is currently the original singer Kazuhiro Asaeda (who is known at least on the 2007 release Vol I. could hear) as well as from Eternal Elysium whose ex-bassist Toshiaki Umemura has recruited as drummer along with current board member Yukito Okazaki as guest guitarist.
A structure that sounds great for the most part. Asaeda sings with a kind of hoarse desperation, sardonically straining. Next to it, a band grooves wonderfully heavy and messed up tight, turns the channel search with a tried and tested view of human atrocities towards the long-known recipient Electric Wizard and Goatsnakepours out a cornucopia of great riffs and strong hooks that is captivating over the full distance, and wallows in a dreamily dirty, raw, bluesy dusty sound that is actually archaic and ascetic, reduced to the essentials, and has a good deal of volume with meat on the ribs , with moderate force lets the muddy strings rise poisonously, but at the same time stages the drums at least ambivalently after e-plastic – especially in Most Evil (Fritz Harmann), in which Asaeda wonderfully soulful in the Black Sabbath-Church croont.
The fact that Mikami recently caught fire again (or lost his bread job in the pandemic and suddenly had a lot of musical time) was already in 2022 about the revival of Sonic Flower guess. But underlines Born Under a Mad Sign this spark catching in terms of inspiration even more evident by Church of Misery present their most compelling, also most lastingly sticking material for years, which one could at best blame for having heard this kind of stuff from the band even better (especially on their early masterpieces Master of Brutality and The Second Coming – and of course the almost perfect one Early Works Compilation).
In this respect, Mikami ennobles the story of Church of Misery here through an album that elevates solid stoner-doom competence to form-perfect art, in that even a relative standard like the dryly crushing, constantly reining in its reins Come and Get Me Sucker (David Koresh) offers a level that most of the competition would sell their mothers for, while otherwise every song indulges in the odd flash of inspiration – what Born Under a Mad Sign then turns into more than pure genre show running:
Beltway Sniper (John Allen Muhammed) treats his departure to an elegiac lead heroic, meanwhile Freeway Madness Boogie (Randy Kraft) with an extra portion of fuzz emphatically snappy and straight forward on the highway and Murder Castle Blues (H. H. Holmes) slows down the tempo and the volume with a latent Lemmy feeling as a dynamic contrast – leaning into his stoicism a bit too lazily when standing alone, but not only serves the flow of the album, but also accelerates so much in the last third that there are no signs of fatigue.
Spoiler fulfills the position of the traditional cover song in a particularly outstanding way Haystacks Balboa-Number with shimmering psych organ mutated into a progg jam before Butcher Baker (Robret Hansen) particularly epic motivated marching from the Roadhouse Bar into the desert. Exactly along the expectation attitude means up Born Under a Mad Sign always above of expectations, which says less about the difficult 10s of the band than about the current form of Church of Misery speaks.
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