ALBUM REVIEW: A History Of Nomadic Behavior – Eyehategod
EYEHATEGOD are here to save us. Coming off the back of a year that was as much fun as playing catch with liquid shit, and heading into one that looks like more of the same, NOLA’s most spiteful sons are here to channel the frustration and hatred festering beneath the surface of everything right now into their signature brand of aural acidity.
Now, it must be said – whether their sixth full-length, A History Of Nomadic Behavior, is destined to be a stone-cold classic, an inarguable genre essential as 1993’s Take As Needed For Pain or 1996’s Dopesick were, is up for debate. While these 12 tracks don’t constitute the perfect EYEHATEGOD album, they do constitute an important one.
Thirty three years into a career of debauchery and dirt, in the midst of a global pandemic, it’s a minor metallic miracle that EYEHATEGOD are here at all. They’ve weathered storms both metaphorical and literal, outlasting peers, fads, presidential administrations and entire music scenes. They’ve earned respect all over the world for living, playing, and committing hard.
But whatever it is – there’s something that creaks a little about A History Of Nomadic Behavior. The elder statesmen still sling sludge at its purest – Jimmy Bower crafts caustic riffs with peerless efficiency – but sludge isn’t what it was three decades ago. It’s expanded, sucked in influences from far and wide, and mutated to become (arguably) even more misanthropic and filthy than it’s ever been.
For many, there’s enough classic EHG meat on these bones to delight here. Mike IX Williams still pontificates with righteous, snarling fury. The Outer Banks sees him howling, in near ragged spoken word, over descending, chugging riffs and rapid snare rolls. Fake What’s Yours drips with striding, sneering bombast, fast-pumping buzzsaw riffs peppering the track. Three Black Eyes is textbook EYEHATEGOD – growling bass, snarling riffs, tumbling drums and heaving feedback seeing the quartet cooking with ketamine.
The band nail-down a ‘jam room’ vibe that surfaces throughout, giving the listener a peek behind the fuzzy curtain into what it might be like in the rehearsal room. Current Situation breaks out in a brief burst of bass before the band assemble the track underneath them, and Smoker’s Piece is a genuine surprise; a smoky, psychedelic blues piece, all shuffling drums and walking bass.
All the elements that make EYEHATEGOD so fearsome are there – Williams‘ vitriolic scribblings leap off the page as he snarls “I wanna burn at the stake at the same time as lady liberty” or “I’d rather be a corpse than a coward” (The Trial of Johnny Cancer), “Destroy the USA” (High Risk Trigger) or a triumphant repetition of “Kill your boss!” (closer Every Thing, Every Day). The amp-straining, roiling feedback is ever-present, the band having this down to an ear-shredding art.
But for some reason it doesn’t connect with the breeze-block finality of some of their earlier releases. Jimmy Bower plays with riffing, time and tempo (these songs are never boring), but it leaves areas in Built Beneath the Lies and Circle of Nerves feeling disconnected, a jarring procession of riffs rather than a focused whole, and the twelve-track runtime feels a little sluggish, with mid-album offerings like Anemic Robotic and The Day Felt Wrong relegated to also-ran status.
Arguably the biggest detractor here is the production job. It’s 2021, and EYEHATEGOD are a major label act (Century Media). Of course they can afford to work with high-profile equipment, engineers, mixers and mastering. But it leaves the album feeling a little too fresh, a tad polished, missing the classic instrumental claustrophobia of earlier releases, where Bowers’ guitar was inescapable and the listener felt like they were drowning in tone. It begs the question – should sludge sound, well, kinda shit?
All that aside, A History Of Nomadic Behavior is a welcome sight – a return by a band extreme metal owes much to, at a time when we could all use a bit of misanthropic noise. As we pat ourselves down after the year that was, glad to see ourselves still here, we’re glad to see EYEHATEGOD are still here too. The hate goes on.
Rating: 7/10
A History of Nomadic Behavior is set for release on March 12th via Century Media Records.
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