I had just finished reading the excellent recent re-issue of Kim Newman’s ‘Johnny Alucard’ when I received ‘Raw Howls’ by Alucarda; coincidence? Well, yes as it goes. However, without giving away too many plot points to those who may want to go out and buy the book, it does feature snatches of the seventies, references dark movies of that era, and the raw underground rock scene of New York, something Alucarda sound more than a little influenced by.
Opener ‘Northville Cemetery’ fires up with a dirty garage riff that the late, great, Ron Asheton could have battered out in his most minimalistic heyday, whilst when the vocals growl out in ‘The Filthy Few’ it’s a pure whisky and cigarettes New York Dolls growl, the lyrics spat out with the all the energy and subtlety of a noisy party fuelled by a combination of too much speed and angst. Lyrically, there’s little doubt that the band must have been raised on a diet of exploitation horror movies where witches mixed with hippies and Harley-Davidsons, and would have had titles like ‘Werewolves in Leather’, or the bands own titles ‘Temptress of Evil’ or ‘Cloven Howls’ (by the way, don’t go looking for ‘Werewolves in Leather’, I just made that up!). ‘Cloven Howls’ even starts with a sound bite that could have been culled from a documentary of that time whereby an earnest conservative reporter would stare into camera whilst shaking his head and bemoaning at the loss of a generation of youth. Well, that reporter would have had his weary views confirmed by the fuzzy, nasty riffs of ‘Raw Howls’ and their accompaniment or battered drums and thudding bass.
‘Witches Dance’ brings a gentler and more subtle sound and arrangement, in the way that a kick in the shins is maybe more subtle than a knee to the balls, the proto-punk rock sprint being reined back in favour of a slower, almost, and I do mean at best almost, doom like stomp, that slower slog evolving to a new level in the opening bars of ‘The Savage’, a number that sounds as if it could be a long lost Electric Wizard demo when that act was young and full of energy and undeveloped. A comparison that I’m sure I won’t be alone in noticing and making is that Alucarda have the same raw punch as Satan’s Satyrs, a band that coincidentally share bassist Clayton Burgess with Electric Wizard, at least at time of writing this review; I’m pretty damn certain that if I were to peruse the shelves of of both acts there would be a shared collection of Stooges and MC5 records, a love of stripped down garage rock, and no small number of Roger Corman films to boot! Hell, that can only be a good thing in my mind, and on The Church Within Records the band may well have found their natural home.
This is not an album for the shoe gazer to get their gloom on with, nor is it one for the technophiles to admire for its myriad displays of flashy techniques and eight string guitar solo wizardry; Dream Theatre this most definitely is not! This is an album to accompany the swigging of cheap cider in sweat pit clubs, the sort of venue where it should be played at a volume to have the stained pint glasses shaking on the shelves to each bass blast.
(7/10 Spenny)
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