Album number 11 is a blast from the past
In the build up to his band’s new album, Kirk Windstein – the one constant in Crowbar for getting on for 30 years – has spoken about his admiration for Motorhead and the way Lemmy did things over the years. In an article printed in these pages just a few days ago he said something telling: “My whole outlook on music as a career is the Motörhead outlook, which is that slow and steady wins the race. If you continue to put out killer records, continue to kick ass onstage every night and continue to treat your fans with respect, that’s the stuff people will remember,” he suggested.
Laudable stuff, and there is definite feeling that he means it too. But there is another similarity with Mr. Kilminster’s mob: Crowbar have a signature sound. Think of classic New Orleans sludge metal and you are thinking of Crowbar.
For this record, there appears to have been a desire to get back to the basics that work. Perhaps because Todd “Sexy T” Strange (the band’s original bass player) is back, there is a real feel of their early work about “Serpent Only Lies”.
The first lines of the record’s first track “Falling While Rising” gives all the clues as to where the four piece are right now: “my darkest hours of time/are staring in the soul” sings Windstein as he always he does in that seething half growl thing he does. The really interesting part of all that, though, is that those words only kick in after a minute of sledgehammer heavy riffery.
The band basically only have two speeds: slow and fast – the absolutely crushing “I Am The Storm” is a wonderful example of the latter – and they only play in two ways: heavy and very heavy, and it’s all here.
This light and shade is something that Crowbar don’t often get enough credit for, but it’s what makes “…..Lies” their best album for a very long time. A sense of real nightmarish foreboding is shot through “Surviving The Abyss”, this is immediately followed by the moshpit rousing title track and you feel that “Enemy Beside You” is at the centre point of the record because it is the mission statement, if you will. The bile with which the frontman delivers the suggestion that “if you grew a pair of balls it might just save your life……” indicates it is a real personal mission for him.
If those three are the engine room almost, then the rest isn’t too shabby either. “Embrace The Light” has more than a hint of early Alice In Chains about it, “On Holy Ground” boasts an intro that is genuine metal, and “Song Of The Dunes” is what passes for a ballad around here in that it doesn’t crush, it just comes in lurking in the shadows giving flashes that it might have some real menace.
Appropriately, “As I Heal” ends things by reprising all that is good about the other nine songs, and in doing so it concludes a record that is possibly better than anyone dared hope that a band at this stage of their evolution could produce.
Crowbar don’t make bad records, but in “Serpent Only Lies” they have made a real cracker.
Rating 8.5/10
