The fact that Metallica are here at the moment — and thanks again to the Welsh Rugby Union for messing up the disabled tickets, meaning I got my money back but am not there — set me thinking about the first time I saw Corrosion Of Conformity.
They were opening for Metallica, they’d just put the wonderful Wiseblood album out, and I can still remember the feeling that no one else sounded quite like them.
All these years later, that hasn’t changed.
“Good God? / Final Dawn” has that guitar sound that only Pepper Keenan gets. Thick, swampy, bruised, but alive. “I’m a reality mover,” he sings, in his best Clutch-adjacent growl, while the lead break doesn’t so much cut through as pierce. It is immediately, unmistakably COC.
And yet Good God / Baad Man is not a band resting on what they already know. “You Or Me” shows the scope of these songs. They wind, they stretch, they flirt with almost prog-like passages, and then they explode. “Gimme Some Moore” is rawer, closer to their early days in spirit, and it feels like a stunning return: urgent, wired and full of bite.
“The Handler” is built on a proper Sabbath groove, but what’s striking is the desire to take chances. Even for a band who have always moved from punk to metal to southern rock and back again without asking permission, this feels restless. “Bedouin’s Hand” is a supreme example of an album that goes wherever it damn well pleases, while “Run For Your Life” ends the first half in harrowing fashion, its spoken-word section genuinely astonishing.
Then “Baad Man” arrives, starting with its near-namesake and, frankly, Jesus wept. It grooves. It swings. It reminds you that COC have always understood heaviness as something physical, something that moves as much as it crushes.
“Lose Yourself” has an almost sci-fi quality, as if the band are staring out over some scorched, neon wasteland, while “Mandra Sonos” acts like a passageway into the album’s darker second half. “Asleep On The Killing Floor” is a real highlight, all quickfire delivery and superb drumming, before “Handcuff County” turns into a bluesy southern rocker — ZZ Top playing a Hells Angels show, basically, and I mean that as the highest compliment.
It’s the little touches that make this record, though. “Swallowing The Anchor” almost suggests COC go disco, and if that floats your boat, then get yourself here immediately. “Brickman” is an acoustic-tinged ballad, the sort of thing that brings back memories of Pride And Glory back in the day, before “Forever Amplified” closes things in genuinely astounding fashion, complete with soulful backing vocals and the sense that the band have somehow found another level right at the end.
Corrosion Of Conformity already have two of my favourite albums in their canon, and whatever journey they’ve been on, from punk to this, they have always been unafraid.
Even for them, though, Good God / Baad Man is brave and brilliant.
Rating: 9/10
