Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Clutch
Label: Weathermaker Music Records
Release: 2009
Length: 48:51
Rating: 4.5/5
Clutch have clocked a full 20 years this year! With their ninth album, “Strange Cousins From The West,” the American band still hasn’t stopped blowing minds. They remain potent, inspired, real, uncompromising, and rich in a sound that’s entirely their own. Clutch are one of those rare bands who showed up right before the “grunge boom” and swung around it in a wide arc (luckily) without a scratch, developing a style you can’t file under anything “on first listen.” And this ninth studio album once again confirms the sharpness of men who build their rock legacy on the mattresses of power blues rock, with stoner rock elements gnawing their way in. An uncut diamond of unmistakable identity and unique energy, the kind this band’s working chemistry has in spades, and it has fully shaped the new album too. When a wave of this singular rock toughness washes over any listener, it’s not hard to picture a quartet of naughty, scorched, “greased-up” workers sweating in the hot hell of a steelworks: short hair, high foreheads, thick-bearded scruffiness, mouths steaming with a hearty supply of alcohol fumes, constant thoughts of strictly perverse sexual origin automatically raising their rustproof nether tools. Yep. Clutch are one of the few bands that don’t skimp on the brand of genuine eroticism in their sound.
What’s new on this Clutch album is that you won’t hear the sound of Hammond B3 organs anymore, which were a trademark companion on the previous three Clutch albums. Yes, you read that right. Clutch have gone back to the retro energy of the earlier albums, but only for the sake of a more pronounced hardness in the sound, while the blues component remains a hugely important building block of the band’s sound, more so than on the other pre-Hammond era albums.
The guitars once again get more room for the Clutch range of expression, which Tim Sult fills with real finesse and exploits with winning moves. To the raw riffs he sometimes adds the mighty steel sound of beefy slide guitar (Let A Poor Man Be), and at other times he builds on the raw, concrete roar of primitive rock n’ roll stoner riffs by shuffling over wah-wah effects (Algo Ha Cambiado). Just how rich Sult is in his simplicity is proven by his inventiveness on songs like Witchdoctor (where he turns feedback to his advantage, as a sonic curtain in the background) or Struck Down, which in its main motif is one of the album’s biggest deviations and actually one of its peaks.
The opener Motherless Child, with the grinding clang of an acoustic guitar and a southern scent, plows in as dangerously as if dragging a “razor” across the ground, when a riff tears across it into a ragged, roaring blues rock attack that holds up a mirror, without a shred of respect, to the miserable fate of America’s lower class. Mockingly and with a fool’s shaving, which isn’t exactly a hallmark of American “narrow” wits. Clutch are otherwise incredibly raw in the directness of their primitive yet moving sound. Moving precisely because it feels so real when it hits the listener. It grabs you and drags you back, in this reality, to the best of times, when the pioneering genius of Jimi Hendrix himself and heroes “like him” knew how to shock and enrich this planet, now thoroughly “plucked” of everything good.
Clutch are just four guys. But their “grind” is worked out in contrast. A booming, howling, deep and explosive drum sound, enriched with plenty of fills that only fan the flames of the dynamics and lend them an extraordinary touch of reanimated garage vitality. Like a propeller, a pulsingly thick, almost bristly bass line cuts into this mix, and there are poisonously crunchy, stocky riff avalanches that string together, through dead-simple tricks, a rich variety of figurations on the basic motifs driving the songs. And last but not least, the most important element of the Clutch sound: Neil Fallon’s vocals. Gruff, piercing, fierce, accusing, you can feel in them an inexhaustible pain that guides the singer in the very delivery of the verses. A voluminous voice of incredible penetration, it almost sounds as if a Black vocalist were trapped in Fallon’s skin. Sult’s inventiveness is exceptional. Take the trivially original riff of Minotaur, which demands a lot of repetition: the guy plays almost every round a little differently. Either he lightly mutes the strings, or he helps himself with a slight bending of the notes and the like… But that’s not all. Clutch can be dramatically bold, and they don’t turn everything into “goofing around.” The heavy, incredibly dark march Abraham Lincoln drags you into that irreversibly, and despite its even rolling, it offers an exceptional range of moods.
There’s no dip in quality between the songs. All of them are strictly “wandering-vagabond” in content, riding the line of blues and stoner, and once again you can’t figure out how to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of genre analysis. And that’s the biggest draw, the thing that makes Clutch so unique and wonderful in the world of music.
Clutch are those working-class heavies who won’t stop preaching. They’ll fill your head with stoner blues rowdiness with a southern aftertaste, where besides the penetrating, merciless rattle you’ll also taste the unconcealed fragrance of alcohol derivatives and the juiciness of erotic urges, which the guys achieve purely through their playing and delivery of verses. Clutch are naked, scorched by the southern sun, and can’t stand pretense and hide-and-seek. This is music for the “stronger” ones! It will lift you to the peak and shake you, it’s presented that inspired, genuine and sincere. A new Clutch album! As good as all the rest. No wavering, no weaknesses. This is what real rock music should be all about. Only for the toughest “rockers”!
Lineup
Neil Fallon – vocals, guitar
Tim Sult – guitar
Dan Maines – bass
Jean-Paul Gaster – drums
Production
J. Robbins
Tracklist
1. Motherless Child (4:15)
2. Struck Down (4:23)
3. 50,000 Unstoppable Watts (3:48)
4. Abraham Lincoln (5:58)
5. Minotaur (4:52)
6. The Amazing Kreskin (4:37)
7. Witchdoctor (4:11)
8. Let a Poor Man Be (5:31)
9. Freakonomics (3:21)
10. Algo Ha Cambiado (4:09)
11. Sleestak Lightning (3:47)
