The first thing you’ll probably notice about NYC’s hardcore band Chain Gang Grave is that they sound an awful lot like EYEHATEGOD. The second thing you’ll likely notice is that they absolutely fucking rule! Whether or not these revelations hit you simultaneously is really dependant on your familiarity with the aforementioned sovereign slag-slingers, but the second of these two observations is really the one that is key. Chain Gang Grave are consummate sonic antagonists who have set themselves against a corrupt society as its indomitable foil. Even Mike IX Williams agrees.
Cement Mind is Chain Gang Grave’s most recent album and follow up to Bury Them and Keep Quiet. On this album, the band continues to indulge in that same organ-mud slurry of grooves and spilling, ruptured psyche that you’d expect from a band whose earned such favorable comparisons to punishing, spine-bridge crossers like The Melvins and Mantar. However, there is something older and meaner at the core of their sound that makes this album feel more binding on the listener’s soul.
One part is its embrace of blues rhythms of the devil-dealing variety that EYEHATEGOD has been increasingly wanton to embrace, especially on their most recent album A History of Nomadic Behavior. The other is, I think, a sense of the effects of what post-industrialism has done to urban life, and life in general in the United State, where the communities can no longer provide the things they need for themselves, and where the concept of a free-actor has been replaced by that of a consumer. Working doesn’t provide or produce so much as it feeds and justifies one’s own appetites. This advanced state of entropy and Satanic state of society was captured first and foremost on the first four Black Sabbath records, and if you are going to trace Chain Gang Grave’s sound back to its origins, this is the manor door you will need to knock on.
I imagine you’re thinking right about now, “So we have a punk band inspired by classic Sabbath,? Wasn’t that Black Flag’s thing once upon a time?” And the answer is, “Yes.” But where Greg Ginn had attempted to capture the sour emotions and molten temper of these dark sages in the waiting days of Black Flag’s cultural relevance, Chain Gang Grave have impeccably succeeded.
The opener and title track is a dense pour of hate-blistered chords dumped into the cranial cup of your head troth, flushing and searing as they swirl in a messy puddle of angst and dread. “Backwards Reaction” binds its self together with skeletal death rock hooks, feeling barely contained in its elastic, slime and sweat lacquered skin. “Fever Dream,” true to its name, will induce a cold monsoon of perspiration to bath your sickness-scourged flesh with a quaking, sputter-chunk groove and punishing turn-over of percussion. “Money Coccoon” reminds of Oozing Wounds psychedelic, sludge-thrash and bust, while “Tinfoil Brain Leach” increases the menacing potential of the band’s sound with a vocal performance from Andrew Lanza that sounds like its coming out of PA system lodged several feet underground and in the belly of an active furnace. The most darkly psychedelic of the tracks on Cement Mind is not surprisingly “Psychic Commode,” which sounds a parasitic manifestation of shoegaze, gestated and pupated inside the gusts of drug-addled crust punk, which have now hatched and are exploding out of his offices in a torrent of gore and eldritch looking maggots. The band then takes this apocalyptic vibe and layers on several layers of lean, wolfvarine-like muscle for the album’s finale, the Obsessed-meets-Discharge, roadhouse steam-roller “Denial Made Flesh/Painseeker.”
You can stream the entirety of Chain Gang Grave’s Cement Mind below via Bandcamp:
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