Honey Lungs and Falling Blackbirds

Black Moth - The Killing Jar
Black Moth, a stoner rock outfit from Leeds, England, sound like a lot of things. You could fill a review with comparisons: they sound like Black Sabbath with Grace Slick singing for them, they sound like Acid King with a punk rock impatience, they sound like Alice in Chains imagined by Donita Sparks. The list could be much longer, and all of it would be fairly accurate, but all of them would miss the mark a bit. Black Moth reach throughout rock history for their influences, but in the end, the brew they concoct is their own.

The Killing Jar is built on a stoner rock template, but you only have to listen to the opening track, "The Articulate Dead," to hear just how much punk rock has made its way into Black Moth's sound. In fact, the ratio of Black Sabbath sludge to Misfits punk makes this album somewhat reminiscent of the Melvins and the heavier grunge acts of the past. The sound is low and filthy, a perfectly distorted bass-heavy grind for Harriet Bevan's bold vocals to soar over.

A clear highlight of the album is "Blackbirds Fall," a midtempo display of all of Black Moth's best tendencies. A full-on stoner outfit would take riffs as good as these and build an eight minute opus out of them, getting as much mileage out of the elements as they could, but "Blackbirds Fall" is a testament to Black Moth's punk brevity, as it only clocks in at four minutes. It tells you exactly what it needs to and departs without overstaying its welcome. This is true of the whole album really, with ten songs at under forty minutes, the album is surprisingly tight for a stoner/sludge effort. There is plenty of memorable lead guitar work, but very few flashy solos (another example of their punk/grunge influence). The production by Bad Seeds drummer Jim Sclavunos is spot on, the combination of the thick, dirty guitars with Bevan's clear, powerful voice is practically addictive.

The Killing Jar is an album refreshingly free of attempted superlatives. It's not trying to be the heaviest, fastest, slowest, or trippiest. It's a release that simply contains ten heavy, catchy, fun songs, which is a lesson that more heavy bands could take to heart. Other heavy albums will no doubt receive more attention this year, but I'm betting I won't play many of them as often as this one.

Alive in the Superunknown - Thoughts on Soundgarden's Masterpiece

RFF is currently stuck in a 90's grunge state of mind, and with Soundgarden recently reformed and preparing an album of new material, it's worth taking a look back at their high water mark and remembering what made them the band they became.

As the original grunge bands began to cede to rock and roll attrition, the imitators began to cash in. Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and especially Pearl Jam all had bands crawling out of the woodwork to try to bleed off fans looking for more of the grunge sound. But for all the interest in drawing out the fame that the Seattle music explosion created, there were very few who attempted to ape Soundgarden's style, largely because Soundgarden is the most difficult of Seattle's big four to imitate. Their specific brand of music pulled deeply from metal. There is a definite Sabbath feel, as there was with most of the original grunge bands, but Chris Cornell's wailing vocals seemed to come more from the Robert Plant school of singing, and Cornell seems to be one of the last (unironic) singers to be pressed from that particular mold.

Soundgarden's peculiar take on metal would add to the inimitable nature of their style as well. Their masterpiece, Superunknown, is perhaps the best example of this. Bizarre tunings and off-kilter time signatures abound on the record. Guitar magazine interviews from the time tell us that rather than the standard EADGBe guitar tuning, they used alternate tunings like CGDGBE ("Mailman" and "Limo Wreck"), EEBBBB ("My Wave" and "The Day I Tried To Live"), CGCGGC ("Head Down"), and CBGDGD ("Like Suicide"). Time signatures that were previously only the territory of the proggiest of prog bands were used: "My Wave" uses 5/4, "Fell On Black Days" uses 6/4 time, "Limo Wreck" uses 15/8, "The Day I Tried To Live" and "Spoonman" alternate between 7/4 and 4/4 sections, and "Black Hole Sun" makes use of both 4/4 and 9/8. The fact that these odd parameters were used for songs that were radio hits is nothing short of astounding, but Soundgarden's talent was such that they could form songs so natural and catchy from such twisted musical architecture. Not to mention that they did it all largely by accident, as the band maintains was the case. No wonder then that there were very few acts that ever wanted to try to imitate them. Sure, anyone could have tried to phone it in, but the result would never have anything near the same feel as the originals, and the effort of any serious attempt would have outweighed the profit.

Superunknown is an album that's easy to love, but hard to understand. Easy to remember, but hard to copy. The lyrics are either oblique or deceptively straightforward. There is anger and frustration in there, but there is a sense of confusion throughout. There is misery, but the lyrics come at it at strange angels compared to the upfront sort that Alice in Chains traded in to great success. Surreality is the norm on Superunknown, from the dream imagery of "Black Hole Sun" to "4th of July," supposedly a transcript of an LSD trip. The themes on the album are hard won, brought back from areas not normally accessed by the mind. Give Superunknown a spin and let it pull you back to 1994. It's worth the trip.