Aural Fixations

CLUTCH
Blast Tyrant
(Issachar Entertainment/DRT)
The long-running heavy rock band Clutch hit a personal milestone with its last studio album Pure Rock Fury, a stunning, powerhouse piece of groove-metal that reiterated the fact that carefully-crafted songwriting and wild rock & roll abandon are not opposing concepts. Blast Tyrant, the proper follow-up following a water-treading live record, proves that the Maryland-based quartet is on a roll. Nearly the equal to Fury, Blast Tyrant revels in precisely arranged storms of savage grace. Bassist Dan Maines and drummer Jean Paul Gaster are one of the greatest rhythm sections in rock, rolling funk, metal and psychedelic groove into such a tight cylinder that you can't tell where one musical thread ends and another begins. No one pounds the crap out of the beat with such fluid grace. Guitarist Tim Sult fully integrates the lesson taught by past masters like Jimi Hendrix and Tony Iommi (it's the riffs that matter, not hot-shit soloing), and he empties a seemingly bottomless bag of spine-cracking licks onto a sturdy lattice of teeth-gritting melody. On "Ghost" and "The Regulator," he also raises eyebrows with his considerable prowess on acoustic guitar. Singer Neil Fallon confidently strides this rugged landscape, chest forward and eyebrow cocked, knowing his bandmates have laid out such meticulous topography he can step anywhere without fear of falling. His snide roar and witty lyrics fit as snugly in this well-organized chaos as a dildo in a porn star's anus. Blast Tyrant is allegedly a concept album of some sort, but with Fallon's love of wordplay and refusal to illuminate his ideas, who knows? Suffice to say that hard rocking nuggets of beastly tuneage like "The Mob Goes Wild," "Profits of Doom" and "Army of Bono" (a reminder of a certain world-famous rock singer's penchant for messiah complexes) form a loose set of caveats about allowing any kind of leader—captain of industry, high-priced politico, popular bandleader, whatever—to have too large of an influence on what you think or how you live. Really, though, the sheer rush of might meeting melody, smarts meeting savagery, nimble feet meeting pounding fists is what Clutch is all about, and Blast Tyrant is a damn near perfect manifesto. Michael Toland [buy it]