CLUTCH - Blast Tyrant
April 7, 2004, 20 years ago
(DRT)
"The beer and the broads and the broads and the booze!" followed by some righteous echoing yeahs... that's got to be the magic crafters ritual sacrifice rock moment of the '00s to date, God be my witness. That occurs at the 1:32 mark of Promoter, one of many livin' large songs on Clutch's best damn record ever (and that says a lot), a fierce, fiery blues-bonged thing called Blast Tyrant. I've said it before, Neil Fallon's got to be our greatest lyricist still in fecund operation (I wish he'd make 'em easier to read), and the power package behind his blubbery yell... man, they take all the best bits from Zeppelin to Masters Of Reality, not to mention the most grievous, worn, shorn blues (see The Regulator), and cook 'em up in a big cauldron until the fumes knock you out. Best drum sound I've ever heard, and maybe Jean-Paul Gaster is the grooviest drummer on the booty planet - how's that for two in his corner? And you want to hear Tim Sult and Dan Maines push some heavy air, look no further than the first mere minute of the album, where the metal they melt gets mainlined to the brain still boiling. The Voivod-ian packaging (think The Outer Limits) is a gorgeous, philosophically suited beautiful thing as well, mirroring Fallon's fanciful tales of backwoods goings on abstractly/visually, as if the guy's images can't be vividly and rapidly seen in the mind and enjoyed any no how.
