Truly disturbing album art from Blue Sabbath Black Cheer circa "For the Sickly Weaklings" LP.
Blue Sabbath Black Cheer‘s discography is a strange beast, charcoal-grey, raging like a burning forest and constantly offering new glimpses into the minds of principle members Stan Reed and wm.Rage. One thing that bothers me, however, is the fact that older records like For the Sickly Weaklings are obviously superior to many of the albums that came after. It’s almost as if the duo became progressively more comfortable with their aesthetic, to the point where offering a variety of sounds became less interesting to them than honing in on the more specific aspects of their attack — dark drone, shivering, crackling noise — and driving the formula deeper into the sea than Osama bin Laden‘s corpse (HIYO!!!).
There’s nothing wrong with probing the darkness for more all-black ways to string gray clouds together, but I’ve always appreciated — within reason — the more eclectic approach. For example, my two favorite Melvins albums are Honky and Stag, both of which are teeming with changes of pace, odd detours, shifts from forward-facing to neutral and a stylistic jumble that would leave many of their peers (of which there were few to begin with remaining) stumbling to find a metal sub-genre King Buzzo and co. hadn’t already hit upon with a golden sledgehammer.
But back to For the Sickly Weaklings; it’s so strong I can’t listen to latter-day material such as the collaboration with Nihilist Assault Group without yearning for the clanks, bangs, zooms, flutters, zips and flat-out gutteral menace of Weaklings. To me it’s on par with some of the doom-noise-drone greats like SunnO)))‘s Black One, and not only that but it encourages multiple listens by dint of its subtle shifts from fuzzy to scuzzy to MIND-FUCKING chaos and back again.
A strong debut record from a band that would RAIN DOWN on the Seattle noiseniks from 2007 on with the fervor of an ensemble afraid the end is nigh, racing against an unseen clock to put out anything and everything it can wrap its filthy, corpse-defiling record label (Gnarled Forest) around. Most importantly, the Gnarled Forest approach to album art has been incredibly influential to several black-toting group out there (Pussygutt, Rakhim, Locrian, etc.), employing a minimal, bleak, isolationist vision that goes hand-in-grave with the music being spit out like boiling water at a Montana hot spring.
For more fantastic Blue Sabbath Black Cheer stuff check out their 10-inch split with Dried Up Corpse (a BSBC side project) and just about anything else they deemed it necessary to SCORCH to tape. Yes, as I mentioned, not all of the material is spine-shanking, but if you’re into the whole post-black-metal-orbitting-in-space milieu you can’t go wrong.
