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Please take a moment to turn up your speakers until you can feel the bass in your chest. If you are wearing headphones, well, please ensure the volume is as high as possible without doing yourself any damage. Please be advised that headphones are a less than optimal Clutch environment.
Thank you.
Clutch is... an acquired taste, but Clutch, once that taste has been acquired, is power itself. There are easily two dozen Clutch songs that can get me from zero to YYYYEEEEAAAAHHHHHHHH in about ten seconds.
I fell in love with Clutch a week before I saw them open for Sepultura on my 20th birthday. I picked up the Passive Restraints EP at Sam the Record Man on Yonge Street, expecting Sepultura-style metal, and got these lyrics:
My father was Black, my mother was Decker
Believe me my friend, it doesn't get any better
Than rack and pinion reasoning, add a little seasoning
Cook at ninety eight point six degrees
...and I knew this was bloody brilliance. Clutch the album was great. This is where the storytelling starts to get teeth -- Supergrass is a great track, but my standout on Clutch is the story of somebody who dredges bodies from the Susquehanna River to sell them for cash and stumbles across the body of Lincoln's assassin. Clutch also got Clutch the closest they, well, ever got to fame, with a song on the X-Files soundtrack, Escape From The Prison Planet.
The Elephant Riders was the pinnacle of rock for me for about three years; particularly the title track, the tale of a Civil War soldier who lives in mortal terror of a legendary division of elephant-riding soldiers.
Pure Rock Fury is my least favourite Clutch album, which is kind of ironic -- it's got a couple of standout tracks, including "Open Up The Border" and the anti-Nu-rap screed "Careful With That Mic", but it lacks... I dunno. It just doesn't grab me the way the others do.
Blast Tyrant is where Clutch moves into mastery. A full-on concept album, everything just seems to gel here -- check out "The Mob Goes Wild" and "Cypress Grove". The chorus on "Mob" is just fucking fantastic:
21 guns, box made of pine, letter from the government sealed and signed
Delivered Federal Express on your mother's doorstep.
Which brings us to Robot Hive/Exodus, and the lyric that I think best sums up the entire band's career to date:
Shadow of the new Praetorian
Tipping cows in fields Elysian
is the most... Clutch lyric in a decade-plus run of Neil Fallon writing Clutch lyrics.
That's the thing about Clutch, too -- they're a mad heavy band with crazed chunky guitars and growling Waits-fuelled vocals, but they're also lit geeks. Every song is peppered with weird references to world history, mythology, pop culture, and thundering layer upon layer of self-referential rock mastery. Clutch sounds like a stupid stoner rock band, and they revel in sounding like a stupid stoner rock band, punching up every '70s noise they can riff on, to the extent of adding a Hammond B3 player to the band for Robot Hive.
If you do not love Clutch after listening to Mice and Gods and/or 10001110101then there are only three possible reasons:
a) You have not yet listened to Clutch at ear-destroying levels while swilling rum half-naked on a mountain top, dressed as a pirate, wounds fresh from battle with Ice Wolves, bass pounding in your chest and blood in your eyes;
b) You have abandoned Rock. And you shall never rock again;
c) Clutch just isn't your thing.
Anyway. That is my pitch for Clutch. I believe they are the smartest heavy rock band on the planet right now, and if they are not the most rockingest, I do not know who is.
Clutch.
Clutch.
Note: I'll leave these song links live for a day or so, then kill 'em. If you are finding this thread at some future point, Amazon.com has sample links for most of these tracks, I'd imagine. |
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