It’s another week of the BSH Saturday Music Club, where we get together and listen to an album of one person’s choosing, and write our impressions. This week, Thomas picked out New Orleans sludge metal legends Crowbar’s 1998 classic, Odd Fellows Rest.
I don’t know what it is about my personal tastes, but I have always been drawn to heavy music. And while this upcoming example is certainly what people think of when those two words are smushed together in a long-bearded sonic entanglement, the music that has gripped me the most is something that I can feel deep in my bones.
Whether it is the most soulful, straight-from-the-guts hard bop inspired by Coltrane, or some of the heaviest riffs you will ever let in your ears – what kept me interested and actually re-visit a record was something that you can just tell had feeling behind it and wasn’t trying to ease up on anything. Nothing that would make any compromise to get a larger audience, or something like that, just something that felt good.
And while I can just go on and on about why I like the music I like (boring!) it’s fairly evident in Crowbar’s Odd Fellows Rest.
While I could always put an album that I might be digging into more, and it be some powerviolence from the mid-2000s or whatever the latest Floridian death metal album is, Odd Fellows Rest feels like the perfect heavy album that is just so digestible. There isn’t any hyper-aggressive vocals or tempos so fast that you can’t really nod your head along with it; no, it’s just grooves in a deep sludge tone with some heavy ass riffs and lyrics that just stick to your ribs.
Odd Fellows Rest is an album basically anyone that likes guitar music that uses any level of distortion, can enjoy. Well, that’s what I think anyway.
Crowbar is really my comfort band. If I don’t really know what to throw on, it’s this album that first comes to my mind – or maybe it’s their 1993 self-titled album, or 2001’s Sonic Excess in Its Purest Form – and it’s for just about everything to do with it. From the near-perfect tone of the guitars, the drums mastered so well, the pure harsh vocals of the band’s leader and only existing original member, Kirk Windstein, or even lyrics like “Don’t kill it before it grows” that is just so singalongable on “To Carry the Load”, just so much about this record sits so well with me and what I enjoy.
And if you really just want to get a clearer picture of who Crowbar is, all you have to do is look at this photo of them. It’s music for big boys (and everyone else, too).
Jason M: There was a ’60s Canadian band by the same name, but they had just one song and not a good one at that. You can’t mistake the two that’s for sure. After the “Intro,” the New Orleans outfit sink deep into a thick soup of guitars on “Planets Collide” which would fall alongside Alice In Chains and Pantera and the crawling, creepy Sabbath-ish “To Carry the Load.” When they find a groove as they do on “…and Suffer As One” it makes for an interesting listen and with no Tom Waits-meets-Cookie Monster vocal theatrics like Cannibal Corpse. Always a plus. They sound a bit more metal, less sludge on “1000 Year Internal War” but they get back to their wheelhouse it seems on “December’s Spawn.” Probably the highlight to these ears is “Behind the Black Horizon” as it’s heavy but goes off the rails in a good way. The only departure from the heaviness is the title track which sounds a bit trippy.
Maddie: I think I talked about this last week too, but it bears repeating: I really appreciate this series for the way it forces me to push on the boundaries of what I’m usually listening to. Because this is definitely a bit heavier than anything I have in my regular rotation, and I still really enjoyed it, and I think that’s really cool! It’s different enough, sure, but it also never dipped into the territory of being alienating, it still maintained some touchpoints that I could access, even if this isn’t a style I’m very familiar with. There was something really visceral in this listening experience for me, and while I don’t know that I’d call it a fun experience for me necessarily, it was a cool reminder of how music can meet embodiment.
Joe D.: Like Maddie, these music clubs have certainly pushed some of what I would normally listen to–this most of all, in this summer’s iteration, as I am generally not a metal fan barring rare exceptions (hello, the first couple ISIS albums). I can’t say Crowbar’s Odd Fellows Rest fit that niche for me, even though the riffs are solid, though it was nice to give hardcore metal another shot. What stuck out to me was the release date: 1998, which made this their fifth full length release–these guys have been at it a long time! To have that kind of staying power is impressive, even if Kirk Windstein is the only remaining original member, and it’s cool to think how influential this record must be within that scene.
