Clutch - From Beale St toOblivion

Fri 1st Jun, 2007 in Music Reviews

I’ve been meaning to check these guys out for some time now, plenty of good things have been said about them and those who know their shit from clay seem to be digging it. They’ve been round for the best part of two decades now, so it’s definitely time to give these guys a shot.

Big things have been made of this album, their own label claiming that this latest effort “won’t so much fit into a new era in rock, as confidently define it,” but we know we can never really trust what a label has to say about their own bands. If this were the case, that last Hawthorne Heights album would be one to mark down as the pinnacle of musical genius.

From the word go the sound is raw, punchy and the passion can well and truly be felt. They make no apologies for banging out what they want in exactly the way they want it to sound. This isn’t about fashion and it’s not even close to what is considered – œcool’ at the moment.

For pretty much the first time in their existence, Clutch went into the studio recording a mostly – œlive’ album, also utilising all-analogue recording techniques, something they haven’t done since 1998’s The Elephant Riders. To produce the album, they enlisted the help of Joe Baressi whom you might know for his work with Kyuss, Tool, The Melvins and Queens of the Stone Age. For better or worse, his techniques have managed to give the sound on Beale Street a vibe similar to that of the aforementioned groups. It’s not overly slick in production, however it’s one of the “warmest” sounding albums in a long time with an extremely rich and thick tone.

Genre defining? Not exactly. Original? Kind of, but that’s a subjective word, really. If you wanted to get pedantic, nothing is truly original if it sounds even slightly like something else, but what they do is definitely something that is not highly imitated and over saturated amongst their peers. That they even get tagged as a “punk” band at times is a bit of a slap in the face, with half the obnoxious trash out there that gets the same label. It’s a strange blend that sits somewhere comfortably between southern, stoner, punk rock and blues.

With a running time of just under 50 minutes and fitting a total of twelve tracks, it engages the listener nicely. The main criticism would be the lack of vocal range in the singing. It’s a relatively unique style that suits the music, kind of like a Bleeding Gums Murphy (Simpsons reference, if you didn’t quite catch that) with a more mid-range pitch, rather than baritone frequencies. There is occasional use of backup vocals, though they are almost always in unison with the lead, and as a consequence wind up being drowned out.

It seems a little much to go as far as to say this is an – œessential’ album in any form, nor would it be a must listen. It is, however, a grower of an album, but even then there’s probably only so much that it will grow on you.