[alternative rock, psychedelic rock] (2018) Evil Blizzard - The Worst Show On Earth [FLAC,Tracks] {100.XY}

(2018) Evil Blizzard - The Worst Show On Earth

Review:
Evil Blizzard and their Hawkwind-meets-PIL-and-Papa Lazarou-for-a-scuffle-in-the-car-park vibes were never going to please everyone. It seems unlikely, for instance, that the band will ever get played in the background as you wander around the supermarket or be piped gently into the dentist’s waiting area to sooth anxious patients. Yet for those that embrace the madness, the collective inspire a cult-like devotion.
Think of them like The Grateful Dead except it’s six men from Preston wearing Halloween masks and outfits that include an overly tight glam-rock jumpsuit. They play bass-heavy punk-rock psychedelia and sing about sacrifice, whale bombs and slimy creatures. The Worst Show On Earth is their third studio album and manages to take their belligerent noise-rock rumble to the next level.
The band’s sound still revolves around four bass players and a singing drummer yet this time they’ve introduced a few extra ingredients. Keyboard, cello, piano, samples and some impressively epic guitar all manage to make the cut, fleshing out the bands hypnotic carnival of noise. All of this helps to make The Worst Show On Earth the band’s most accomplished and satisfying record to date.
We start with some superbly creepy piano and cello before diving quickly into the propulsive ‘Hello’. Singing drummer Side still sounds like John Lydon at his most fraught as the curtain raises and the freaks take to the stage. ‘Fast Forward Rewind’ stomps into view next; a noisy paean to cassettes that gleefully drags glam-rock, kicking and screaming through the sewer.
The guitars are raw, fuzz-laden and ready to fly-off-the-handle at a moment’s notice while the rhythm section is absolutely fierce. Perhaps most importantly, both tracks manage to capture the incendiary energy of the band’s gigs.
‘Unleash the Misery’ finds bassist/guitarist Filthydirty on lead vocal, croaking “in every single home there’s another broken dream/ a cavalcade of failure/ a stream of might-have beens…” It’s a dark yet brilliantly cathartic sledgehammer of a song. ‘Those You Left Behind’ introduces a fried, looping digital sample as a pulverising Sabbath-like riff rides through the band’s strangely danceable groove.
The bass lines, as you might hope for a band with so many bass players, are fantastic throughout. The guitars flesh out the sound, at times a fuzzy rifforama and at others bringing a dark shimmering majesty to proceedings as they do on the gloriously menacing ‘Like a God’. ‘Tell Me’ is a brief, comparatively straight-ahead, punk-rock barnburner that prepares the ground for the albums epic conclusion.
The apocalyptic ‘Pull God from the Sky’ starts with an unnerving kid’s voice telling us, “all the stories have been written/ all the songs have now been sung…” The song then slides into a slow, hypnotic and brilliantly nightmarish slice of psychedelia. Side howling as he sings “sometimes I feel higher than your god”. The song gradually building to a moment of pure, unhinged release.
Like The Fall and Swans before them Evil Blizzard manage to harness repetition for their own wicked ways. At 10 minutes in length it rocks harder than all of your record collection combined and is quite possibly the finest piece of music they’ve ever recorded. Devastating in the best possible way.
The album ends with the band at their most experimental, the title track resurrecting the creepy instrumental passage from the beginning of the album and stretching it out into a ten minute ode to epic, world-ending drones. When the guitars finally crash into view around the halfway mark it’s a thrilling hairs-standing-up-on-the-back-of-your-neck moment.
The band play their cartoon-ish villain-like personas brilliantly but don’t let that fool you into thinking that they don’t mean business, The Worst Show On Earth might just be the best rock album you hear all year. If you haven’t been indoctrinated yet then this could prove to be the ideal starting point. In the words of the Evil Dead- join us.

Tracklist:
01 - Hello.flac
02 - Fast Forward Rewind.flac
03 - Unleash the Misery.flac
04 - Those We Left Behind.flac
05 - Like a God.flac
06 - Tell Me.flac
07 - Pull God from the Sky.flac
08 - The Worst Show On Earth.flac

Summary:
Country: USA
Genre: alternative rock, psychedelic rock


Media Report:
Source : CD
Format : FLAC
Format/Info : Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : ~ 784-1000 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits