Review Summary: Clutch has crafted what seems to be the perfect hard rock album with every guitar line, lyric, and drum beat in place. The planets have aligned for the making of this album.
Clutch is a band that over the years hasn't had a large fan base, rather, they have a dedicated one. Fans flock to their concerts in droves confessing their love for the band and the music that Neil Fallon and company have set out to create: simple and groovy hard rock with enough edge for a biker but with enough class for a businessman. Whether they set out to bridge the gap between the primal and the sophisticated is a different story, but the fact of the matter is that they did. Especially with their 2004 offering "Blast Tyrant".
Looking at Clutch's career is like looking at the evolution of music itself. Their first album "Transnational Speedway League" is a prime example of harsh, dissonant brutality and anger packaged with wit and humor along the lines of Helmet. Their self-titled offering moves away from that primal anger into a more cohesive sound taking more direct influence from Led Zeppelin. From then on their music has become more and more mature, leading up to "Blast Tyrant" and beyond. This constant wave of musical expansion and evolution is summed up nicely by Fallon, "If you're not learning then you're retiring. You've got to take risks if you want to learn and there is always something to learn."
Starting with the opening track "Mercury", you can see the lengths that Clutch has taken to be taken seriously as a mature band. All of the instruments compliment each other, from the crunchy heavy blues licks of the guitars, to the jazzy and slightly technical drumming, to the snarling and gruff vocals. The music is made to be catchy and above all: musical. Many bands nowadays try to be the most adept at their instruments, or the most heavy, or the most dissonant. While all of the above may be true, a lot of young players are losing sight of musicality, the very essence of music really. Clutch knows their technical boundaries and doesn't try to work their way past them, but uses them to their advantage. They haven't built a reputation around being virtuosos and don't have live up to that expectation with every album. Now onto the music.
After the bluesy rumble of the opening track we're hit with "Profits of Doom", a psychedelic trip of a song where we're treated to the bluesy riffs Clutch is known for. Taking a page right out of Led Zeppelin II's handbook, the album continues in a flurry of licks and fills that stick with you. Also deserving an honorable mention is Fallon's lyrical mastery. His lyrics are filled to the brim with witty pop culture, biblical, or historical references that sometimes requires a PhD in History in order to understand. Take this line from "Profits of Doom": "Genesis and Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, Gideon is knocking in your hotel while you slumber." Now if you were a connoisseur of hotel rooms, you would know that the Gideons are a group of evangelicals that tend to leave Bibles in hotel rooms. Seriously, how many of you would get that reference? I sure as hell didn't until I did some research for this review.
After that comes the single and so called epic of this album, "The Mob Goes Wild". Fallon's lyrics are witty as ever, even taking a political stance or two during the duration of the song, but it's all in good fun. The last two songs I'm going to delve deeper into are "The Regulator" and "Ghost". Both songs are quasi-ballads and have some of the best lyrics and instrumentation on the album. "The Regulator" brings up the very sensitive question of death and the meaning of life. "Ghost" narrates what seems like an old time small town narrative. The songs is filled with biblical references upon biblical references. From Adam and Eve to potter's field. I can't really pinpoint which lyrics stand out the most, but the chorus of "Ghost" speaks for itself: "The Ribs of Adam/the eyes of Eve/the sons of Cain receive no reprieve".
WYSIWYG is the lone throwaway track here on this album. I don't necessarily hate it, but it seems like a tacked on addition that would interrupt the flow of the album if it were put in the middle as opposed to it being the last track.
Otherwise, Clutch has succeeded in taking the torch that Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath have been waiting so long to be grabbed from them, by perfecting melding hard rock, blues rock, wit, and attitude into one cohesive package.
