ALBUM REVIEW: Death Hymns – Switchblade Jesus
Corpus Christi noisemakers SWITCHBLADE JESUS have been kicking around since 2010 with their blend of sludge and stoner grooves. Part of a sound lineage that encompasses early MASTODON and HIGH ON FIRE, their latest album Death Hymns expanded on this sonic palette to incorporate some thrash elements and tighten up their songwriting even further. The end result is a blast of thrashy, groovy metal with some serious attitude and even more serious riffs.
The somewhat calm opening to Scorched belies the bludgeoning to come, refusing to give the game away until it’s already too late. The riff almost swirls, accompanied by vocalist/guitarist Eric Calvert’s bull roar, demanding your attention. While it and follow up Red Plains are very much straightforward, groove-laden stoner metal tracks with some hefty sludge influences, it’s with third track Behind The Monolith that things veer off in new directions.
It opens with a rollicking groove, charging its way into view before Calvert’s punk-inflected shout makes an appearance and stays at this frenetic pace until near the halfway mark. That’s when SWITCHBLADE JESUS throw the first curveball and drop the tempo to a crawl, reminiscent of the NOLA swamps with a spoken word sample discussing the nature of the mind – as well as treating us to the first guitar solo of the record, which offers a bluesy trip to the end of the song.
Not content to change things up just once, the title track is an subdued interlude; here the bass takes centre stage, with a sidewinder of a lick accented by the guitar. It’s a calming moment to an album that has so far, been rather more frantic and uptempo. Forgotten continues the trend initially with its opening synths, but it soon flowers into a trudging, cataclysmically heavy sledgehammer of a riff with cavernous bellows that sound barely moments away from descending into full-on death metal roars, and this ebb and flow continues throughout.
This willingness to experiment with their sound makes the first two songs seem almost like outliers, but the quality of songwriting ensures this isn’t the case. With seven songs, the album doesn’t exceed half an hour, ensuring it hits exactly as hard as it needs to without outstaying its welcome. That SWITCHBLADE JESUS manage this without sacrificing quality either is admirable and notable in cuts like Behemoth with its two and a half minute blast of snarling sludge fury, sitting alongside Scorched and Red Plains as the more straightforward songs on the album. Closer The Blackened Sun is similar with a shit-kicking riff and massive groove all the way through. The bass melody just after the two minute mark is particularly well-placed to add variety.
Ultimately, Death Hymns is a good take on that blend of stoner and sludge, taking cues from Remission-era MASTODON and others without ever aping them to the point of being unoriginal. The cues are there, but they fold in new elements, like thrashy opener Scorched, as well as Forgotten, that seems to take some inspiration from post-metal as well in its exploration of shifting soundscapes and ebb and flow dynamics. There’s enough going on here that SWITCHBLADE JESUS keep the quality level consistently high, even with the album being just 28 minutes long. Quite simply, it’s a great time that anyone with even a passing interest in sludge or stoner metal will enjoy immensely.
Rating: 8/10
Death Hymns is set for release in June 25th via Hybrid Records.
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