Review Summary: Halloween Special: How many bass players in gimp masks does it take to change a light bulb?
Go ahead and take a guess at which American import has had the greatest influence over the UK in the last fifteen years. Breaking Bad? Middle-East foreign policy? The Hangover Trilogy? Storage Hunters? Way off the mark; for me there’s one clear winner. Up until the turn of the millennium Halloween barely registered on any adult’s radar here; sure you had to fend off a few supervised groups of children and the occasional gang of scrotty young teens chancing their luck but that was about it. Fast forward to 2015 and now Halloween has become a national institution for anyone under 32 years old and may the gods preserve your soul if you refuse to make the required effort. Adaptation has been painful, last year I went the full Freddy Krueger and was turned away at the door for not wearing smart black shoes; pressing my tragic clawed hand to the glass and staring inside I could make out that everyone attending this Halloween Party looked like extras from the Twilight Saga, the perfectly applied alluring vampire make-up upsetting my ingrained British sense of fair play.
Thankfully for most grown men such concerns are a once a year dilemma but for the intrepid few who choose to don masks as part of a stage act it becomes a daily existential crisis. Fancy dress bands have always fallen short of winning my heart up to this point; they either come across as too obviously comical along the lines of Gwar or alternately seem totally devoid of humour in the mould of Slipknot; a strangely po-faced bunch, the horrifying and unavoidable conclusion to draw with the ‘knot is that they’re a pack of dudes who just badly needed an excuse, any excuse, to wear gimp masks and sniff each other’s bottoms in public. By the way, in case you’re wondering, this is not cool.
Enter stage left Preston’s very own Evil Blizzard, an eccentric bunch who might just have stumbled on the sweet spot between these two extremes; there’s something adorably amateur hour about their shtick and while the music itself comes across as little more than a one note joke, thankfully it’s quite a funny one. The press release spiel states that the band are totally averse to rehearsals and knocked this album out in a single day, a none too subtle reminder for the audience to embrace this spirit of anarchy whenever they press that play button; here’s an album that you’re only supposed to take so seriously dear listener. Allegedly the band’s made up of a singing drummer and four bass players; why on earth any band would need four bass players is beyond any right-minded person’s comprehension. Here the Lightning Bolt/Royal Blood dynamic has been turned on its head; instead of asking ‘how can two people make such a fully rounded sound?’ here we’re left to ponder ‘so I guess this is what four bassists bashing it out in a room is supposed to sound like.’
The songs that make up ‘Everybody Come to Church’ flow to the extent that at times it feels like you’re listening to a world record attempt at playing the longest ever continuous Ministry-style dirge. Other times you’ll believe you’ve stumbled on an alternate universe where a bunch of tone-deaf pranksters have rerecorded Swans’ mantra-fest ‘The Seer’ with the art rock pretension level jammed right down to zero. When this dunderhead approach works it’s barnstorming; ‘Balloon’ is thunderous, the drumming connecting at the primal gut level; the sinister ‘Spread the Fear’ would have been a perfect choice to soundtrack the queasily unsettling TV series ‘Utopia’; and ‘Sacrifice’ is the slow building Eastern-infused epic you’ll never confuse with ‘Kashmir’. While the samey nature of Evil Blizzard’s material hardly lends itself to the album format they nevertheless manage to bottle just the required amount of magic here to ensure ‘Everybody Come to Church’ punches above the level of mere advertisement for their no doubt legendary live shows.
So has the album gone that all important extra mile and inspired me to strap a mask to my face again this Halloween? Has it f*ck.
