Crowbar
Odd Fellows Rest

Sludge World; act one.

Now, clearing our minds of any superfluous thoughts, applying our rudimentary but highly effective sense of direction to the outside world, and using "if we have any at all" the most precious gift of all: reason; let us prepare to embrace our fate, "grim, but still our fate," as we head toward the most desolate of violences: Odd Fellows Rest.

This would be the fifth stop for that grotesque formation born 19 years ago, the Crowbar, a sludge metal project distinguished by a scorching, suffocating, and above all, stifled atmosphere. Led by their relentless frontman, Kirk Windstein, an eccentric cross between a motorized vehicle and Santa Claus: endowed with a lethal falsetto capable of adapting to every song he composes and a ferocious bulk as a guitarist, belching full steam without anyone knowing exactly why. But all the members are charismatic sideshow freaks no less: bassist Todd Strange ranks among the lowest and gravest musicians on the scene, Sammy Duet, "formerly of Acid Bath, joined Crowbar right after Audie Pitre's death, thus deciding not to take part in Dax Riggs' project, the Agents of Oblivion," helps his colleague Windstein traumatize their unfortunate and heavily distorted guitars thanks to a cacophonous solo there, a filthy riff here, and roaring mid-tempos, "Planets Collide". What to say, then, about Jimmy Bower, "instead, in his last experience with the band": a madman who believes that using two hammers, "one banging on a bone xylophone and the other mercilessly smashing human skin drums" means knowing how to play the drums. Well, if knowing how to play means evoking in the listener distressing, depressive sensations, and at the same time leaving them with a smile on their face thanks to an exaggerated underlying clumsiness, "precisely because of this two-faced and multi-use ability, but probably unaware of it all," then this tragicomic quadrille, which has made the search for the most annoying and unhappy sound its craft, has the right to be told in all schools, to be on everyone's lips.

And after this long prologue, it is necessary to address the cracks that plague the album: for everything it offers musically, it can safely be called a half disappointment, because it sounds too much like a "commercial" plagiarism of the Melvins; yes, those very ones, "listen to tracks like New Man Born, 1000 Year Internal War, It's All in the Gravity to believe it". Not eclecticism, but a borrowing of big riffs, which are interpreted in a much more violent way, and so slow as to have the ability to stretch minutes into hours. And as if that weren't enough, the album is cursed by a pop aspect that contributes to negatively distorting the sinister creativity of the ensemble, muddying a record that wouldn’t have been a masterpiece anyway, but that would have been much more innovative, with fewer flaws, and above all, less unnecessarily pompous. The lyrics, at least those, have an irresistible emotional and personal imprint: ill-fated nursery rhymes exacerbated by a torture called psychological masochism, a disturbing pleasure in ruining and self-ruining in a refined but uncontrollable way. Lyrics that, due to this very characteristic, risk not fitting with the proposed music, unaesthetic, jagged, inaccessible "but if in the end" opposites attract "it must be acknowledged that, objectively, it is a more than matched pairing. Finally, the band declares themselves not completely estranged from melody, "which is not necessarily the pop mentioned before". Devoted to the most graceless and annihilating melody, and the beauty is it is never placed next to those usual steamroller riffs, but inserted into more experimental and elaborate contexts, "the non-essential title track, and the magnificent Iron Maiden cover Remember Tomorrow".

 Bringing the review to a close, I address that portion of critics, and an even broader camp of Crowbar fans who believe that Odd Fellows Rest is the band's masterpiece: to them, I advise to listen again daintily, think twice and reconsider, first of all.