Artist: Heavy Lord
Title: Balls to All
Type: Album
Label: Solitude Productions

Heavy Lord eh? I think I'll be the judge of that, young fellow-me-lads. Heavy Lord are a Dutch band. They play doomy rock and roll. I also think that if they lived next door to you, they'd be fairly likely to deliberately play long, rambling jams at extremely loud volumes whenever they had the slightest inkling that you were due to be in work early the next day. If I may distil the spirit of “Balls to All”, it would be that this is the kind of band that would shit into a paper bag, set said bag on fire, ring your doorbell, hide behind your door and then do you in with a brick while you were busy stamping out flaming-poo based hijinks.

Allow me to explain. There is a lot here to like. This is an album that at the heart of matters, follows a really addictive pattern of marrying basic, Sabbath like riffs that would fit nicely into the Sabotage / Sabbath Bloody Sabbath vibe, while marrying that with the psychedelic excesses of some of the wider excesses of the stoner rock vibe. Somewhere along the way though, things enter new levels of WTF. From the “Wooo ooo oooo” oddness of high-pitched male vocals introducing the ten minute “Mare Tranquilitus”, to the very Eyehatgod-ness of the frequent hardcore punk edged guitar sounds or minor breakdowns. Perhaps the greatest barrier to out and out thumbs up / bell bottomed wearing approval are the vocals of Steve (also bass). I must confess, this review has taken twice as long as it would normally take for me to produce a review – mostly due to his vocals. The music? Well, the music is pretty much everything I like about doom. Massive, addictive elephantine riffing, world ending bass tones and those basic-but-thrashed-to-bits Wardian drum flourishes. That voice though? When he clean sings, it's nothing out of the ordinary, maybe a little flat, but basically the kind of voice that you might expect to find heading up a new Fu Manchu line up. When he shrieks though? That is some kind of painful. Out of key, out of this world and basically tuned to be massively offensive to my ears. I have learned to deal with it, but I'll be frank, for a couple of weeks I struggled to keep the disc playing.

Production wise? This is a clear but ragged beast, as it should be. All the power of the music is allowed to shine through, with the rough frayed edges of the buzzed out tones still intact. In terms of song writing, finding a five minute track here is akin to finding some kind of rare treasure. Odd, fucked up doom on Solitude? Whatever next? Bears gaily shitting in the woods?

http://www.heavylord.nl

Chris Davison.

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