52 Albums That Shaped My Life - #50

Crowbar – Odd Fellows Rest

(Mayhem Records, 1998/Spitfire Records, 1999)

Buy the album here

Kerrang! magazine is going to get several mentions during the countdown of these albums. No matter how much I think of it as being neon shit these days, I have to remember the influence it had over me as I found my way through more and more heavy music in the late 90s. The staff of Kerrang! at the time deserve credit for bringing me to bands like Earthtone9 (reviewed in the last post), Vision of Disorder, and specifically Crowbar. Before I had access to the internet, or even knew what it really was, Kerrang! reviewed albums and gigs that captured my imagination and had me flicking through the CD sections of Virgin megastores, One Up in Aberdeen, and the sole current survivor, HMV, often more in hope than expectation. I was lucky enough to find Odd Fellows Rest, the first Crowbar album I heard, and still my favourite.

The band name merely hints at the level of heaviness Crowbar want to unleash. They have been justifiably tagged as progenitors of sludge metal, along with fellow NOLA stalwarts Eyehategod, Acid Bath (from whom they hired guitarist Sammy Duet), and fuzz-driven maniacs Melvins, and the sound on this album gives you everything you need to know about the sub-genre. The weight of the sound on songs like “Carry The Load” pulls the tempo down in to the dirt, as if the listener is wading through the swamps of Louisiana. Every riff attempts to crush with sheer heaviness, while the rhythm section feels like Black Sabbath would if they were all 10 tonne giants playing in the atmospheric pressure of Venus. Oddly the first song, “Planets Collide”, is one of the gentlest on the album and Crowbar's standout “melodic” track, pulling melancholic wailing out of verse guitars and vocals. It doesn't lurch from heavy to soft, or dark to light, but layers these sounds in a simultaneously depressive and uplifting epic. The song's final rousing screams of “now watch your planets collide” set up the epic misery of this album – an aural journey through emotions so cripplingly intense that the music barely contains the pressure.

In “December's Spawn” and “Behind The Black Horizon” Crowbar return to this beautiful melding of dark and light with the more sorrowful range of Kirk Windstein's vocals providing perfect balance to the underlying intensity. It is a balance that provides physical and mental respite from the otherwise unrelenting nature of songs like “...And Suffer As One”, “1000 Year Internal War”, “It's All In The Gravity”, and “New Man Born” which hammer home the emotional struggle at the heart of this music. “Scattered Pieces Lay”, with its soaring repetition of the line, “Love... All Is Gone Away”, and touching lead guitar work, brilliantly brings us to the relative caress of title track, “Odd Fellows Rest”, where the juggernauts of this album seem to finally find salvation in clean guitar work and echoey vocals reminiscent of Pantera's cover of “Planet Caravan”. If I felt like this should be where everything ended, I am quickly disavowed of that view with the hardcore attack of album closer “On Frozen Ground”: a brilliant song that encapsulates the power of Crowbar and this album with frantic speed, anger, sorrow, and epic harmonised guitars. For those of us with the 1999 release of the album, the bonus track “Remember Tomorrow”, a cover of Iron Maiden's classic from 1980 (also covered by Opeth and Metallica), shows how confident Kirk and the band had become with their sound by seamlessly drawing this song in to the unique atmosphere of this beautiful and heavy album.

Odd Fellows Rest was the first album to provide me with a clear vision of the type of music I connect with - music that feels as if it is on the verge of breaking down at any moment. Essentially, it is emotional melodrama, often epic in nature, that provides the exaggerated sounds that I want as an outlet. Sounds so heavy they threaten their own destruction.

[for more sounds that threaten their own destruction – or just dodgy production - see also "Through Silver in Blood" by Neurosis, "Anointing Of Seer" by High On Fire, "Peddlers of Death" by Black Label Society, "Floyd The Barber" by Nirvana]