Goatsnake- Black Age Blues (2015)



Goatsnake- Black Age Blues (2015)

“If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music.”
Keith Richards

By: Ghost Writer
I love the bluesy side of early Black Sabbath, The Wizard and N.I.B., are hyper cool tunes to me, I guess few bands have really been able understand that dark, sensuous, satanic blues thing, perhaps Danzig early records captured some if that vibe, that black blues thing, that sound Glenn might have heard on his head but wasn't able to recreate again, although he promised once a black blues record with Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell.

Goatsnake, the musical creation of Pete Stahl and Greg Anderson is an amazing musical beast featuring the slow and heavy guitars of Anderson and Stahl commanding vocals, Elevated Man is a powerful tune featuring Stahl soulful vocal delivery and phrasing sounding close to the legendary The Cult´s singer, Ian Astbury, working on an impossible infectious melody with Anderson awesome heavy and painful riffing, creating here a sound that without a doubt many would kill for, really feeling the blues on its more darkest phase here.

Coffee & Whiskey is another outstanding song with a touch of old crazy Captain Beefheart and his brand of odd blues going on, and again the band finding a clever spot for their contagious sound and Stahl awesome titanic vocals, invocating damned souls to an eternal dark dance, achieving a powerful swing on the near perfect Black Age Blues that might be the closer thing to listening to Astbury fronting the mighty Sabbath we are about to hear, unless Astbury gets back with Boris in a very good day.

Vocally the record gets totally crazy and out there on the slow burner House of the Moon with spine chilling voices (from beyond?) raising to the moon and those droning heavy guitars in what might be an almost cosmic experience with Stahl as the ritual´s shaman, and Anderson creating revolving guitars lines that gets round our neck like a powerful constrictor snake about to give the final stretch.

Stahl great phrasing and voice are put fully in display on Jimi's Gone a distinctive tune once again with heavy vocal choruses and demolishing metallic bluesy guitar riffs, in what might be one of heavy metal's best moments of the year.

With records like this, it won’t be long for Goatsnake to become one of the great metal´s names in modern times and rival Anderson's other project, the always amazing Sunn O))), as for Stahl, this records shows just how underrated this man is, his time has come and he might be on the verge of becoming one of the greatest vocalist in metal recent years, and for Black Age Blues all I can say is that this is not the year's best metal record, but one of the best in years, and I guess both Glenn Danzig, or Ian Astbury would kill to make a record like this.



Comments

Popular Posts