Clutch
Clutch

THE REVIEW

Have you ever heard of Clutch? Nooo?! My dear friends, then I believe you have missed one of the most stylistically and intelligently crafted creatures, where a solid and groovy blues soul meets sturdy stoner doom accents that don’t acknowledge simply self-imploding trajectories, hard&heavy veins in pure seventies old style enriched with a voice that’s like a punch from Tyson in his prime. Precise, powerful, furious, all instinct and sweat.

Neil Fallon is the soul of Clutch, the band’s lyricist, who sometimes screams and attacks nearly in a growl without mercy, providing a perfect counterbalance to the massive and aggressive riffs that Tim Sult skillfully blends, creating a savage, deliberately raw, vintage, and catchy sound, and at times almost whispers teasingly, irreverent and mischievous, among Sult’s heavy melodic lines. Completing the frenzy and vehemence of this sonic amalgam is the rhythmic component of the award-winning Maines-Gaster duo that captivates and dazes with its adrenaline power groove, an engaging no-frills concentration.

This Clutch, the second release from Fallon& Co two years after their first full-length Transnational Speedway League, definitively establishes them as one of the most representative creatures of the 90s stoner rock scene, a wise mix between the 70s-style American heavy, blues, hard-rock tradition—of which there are numerous references in their technical-sound solutions—and, not least, becoming their best-selling album in the USA (to date over 200,000 copies).

The impression you get when listening to the Germantown combo is of a ruthless assault from various angles: a raw multi-faceted sonic storm that embraces within its ambitions heavy, blues, stoner, doom elements, and a damn unstoppable groove that floods and distributes energy without pause, supported by brilliant songwriting sometimes deliberately nonsensical.

The riff of Big News I I think in this respect is the best calling card they could choose: a genius pounding, precise and solid, then reinforced by the usual riff that Sult turns into a very catchy riff introducing Fallon’s robust voice first very controlled and then in the refrain boldly shouted at the top of his lungs, alternating furious outbursts and apparent frustrated calm sedated in the finale by Sult’s alluring slide solo, that swirls and deconstructs itself bringing everything along until it flows into the blow of Big News II, a kind of brief vigorous acid revisitation of the previous song’s main theme, reread in a more heavy-blues key.

And it’s immediately time for another acid riff and the nasty atmosphere of Rock n' Roll Outlaw, ignorant just like the Texan Book of the Dead, an alluring and adrenaline-filled magic box with seventies rhythms and a refrain ingenious in its onomatopoeism, a characteristic Fallon often refers to (Ooeeooahahtwingtwangwallawallabingbang, Ooeeooahahtwingtwangwallawallabingbang, Ooeeooahah, B-I-N-G-O, Ooeeooahah, E-I-E-I-0).

Adrenaline flows like a river and numbs again with the heavy-blues turns filled with acidity of Escape From The Prison Planet, before the album’s fuzz-stoner turn which opens with Space-Grass, which along with Big News I  is worth the entire LP: a sort of relentless stoner doom march devastating in power and malice. The doom lash filled with heavy splinters also inflames I Have The Body Of John Wilkes Booth, telling in a markedly ironic tone the story of a fisherman discovering the killer of Lincoln’s corpse in the Susquehanna River, evidently swollen from days of “forced apnea” in the river (Like Marlon Brando, but Bigger), before the intermezzo of mischief of Tight Like That, and finally taking over with markedly fuzz and psychedelic tones à la Kyuss during the scarce two minutes of Animal Farm.

The stoner verve still rages in the interlocutors Droid and The House That PeterBilt, and focuses exploding in the splendid concluding very bluesy duet 7 Jam- Tim Sult Vs. The Greys:  hypnotic in its catchy and electric advance, visioned and caustic, heavy and acid, pure and authentic condensed of Clutch thinking: the blues as the matrix of every bastard and genuine direction and development of rock'n'roll ("We've been really conscious of the blues over the last couple of years, and you have to admit that the blues really is the source of all rock and roll. I think it's important to go to the source to find that inspiration")

P.S.: If you like, you can read the interview with Neil Fallon here (http://www.blistering.com/fastpage/fpengine.php/link/1/templateid/11405/tempidx/5/menuid/3/)

See Ya!