ALBUM REVIEW: Evil Blizzard – Rotting In The Belly Of The Whale (Crackedankles/Cargo)
Evil Blizzard have been confounding critics and winning new fans for more than a decade now with their bass-heavy aural assault.
Taking a leaf out of Slipknot’s book, the Preston-based band – now six strong – wear gruesome masks and call themselves a ‘Victorian freak show’.
After having four bassists for previous releases, they’ve now ‘only’ got three after Filthydirty swapped four strings for six. They’ve also got a singing drummer and a pig on keys, which makes them quite unlike any other band around.
This is their fourth studio album, but their first with a new line-up which includes Fleshcrawl, Hawkwind’s vocalist and bassist for more than 12 years.
While personnel might change, Evil Blizzard’s hypnotic blend of psych, metal, punk and krautrock hasn’t, and still makes them impossible to label. They’ve introduced more synths and keys to the mix, making their sound fuller than ever.
After touring their last album, 2018’s The Worst Show On Earth, Evil Blizzard took a year off, reconvening in March 2020, just in time for the Covid-19 pandemic to hit.
Rotting In The Belly Of The Whale, released on their own Crackedankles label, was written during and after lockdown, and reflects the fear, paranoia and claustrophobia of those days.
It kicks off with All Pigs With Snouts In The Trough, surely a commentary on the feeding frenzy for lucrative PPE contracts among Tory pals signalled by the pandemic.
Like most of the seven tracks which follow, it’s dense, disturbing even, yet utterly mesmeric; it possesses the power of Black Sabbath, lots of post-punk repetition, and a real gothic feel.
The lumbering All You Bad, Bad People, big-riffing Clouds Like Ghosts and title track Rotting In the Belly Of The Whale are droning, hypnotic, disturbing and awesome, all at the same time.
Professional Driver is a distortion-filled banger with Lydon-like warbling vocals, while Tiny People, the shortest song here at just 57 seconds, thunders along like Girls In Synthesis.
Unsettling
The unsettling Lullaby urges the listener to “sleep well, dream well”, but there’s little chance of that, and things are brought to a close with the epic 11 1/2-minute Darkness, which exudes bleakness before picking up pace and reaching a thrilling climax.
If you’ve never heard them, Evil Blizzard are likly to appeal to fans of Killing Joke, Public Image Limited and The Membranes. So they’re hard to pigeonhole? Who cares when the music’s this good? 8.5/10.
- Rotting In The Belly Of The Whale is available on limited edition pink or regular black vinyl, CD or download (with the latter two featuring a non-vinyl bonus track, The Buried Believers) from Evil Blizzard’s Bandcamp page HERE.
