Who doesn’t love a good surprise? I know I do. You, the debut album by new entity Johnny The Boy certainly provides one. Two central figures of Crippled Black Phoenix, Justin Greaves and Belinda Kordic, joined by Matthew Crawford on bass, have cast off a bit of the tristesse for the time being and replaced it with a nice portion of spite to provide you with the kick in the butt that you didn’t know you needed.
Led by gut instinct and a wish to put new vigour into their decades-long career in underground music, the trio have come up with a dark and nasty sound mixture. Blending black metal, doom and good old rock’n’roll, while simultaneously revelling in generous amounts of undisguised evilness, their music is indeed invigorating to listen to. What makes it even more special is the fact that it is transfused by a subversive form of femininity which has its origins in Kordic’s witchy-scratchy vocal performance. Just come near me, the vocals are saying, and I will scratch your eyes out, and then I will go straight for your jugular.
Kicking off with a reference to the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max and one of its carelessly mean characters nicknamed Johnny the Boy, track number one, Die Already, wishes death to dictators. And the lyrics go like this: ___________ (insert the name of your most-hated autocrat) is “a bully a prick a criminal a dick”, and we will celebrate and rejoice on the day that we’ll finally be rid of him.
After this refreshingly simple and honest opener, we roll around in the Grime for a while, before the suspense-laden, cascading guitar riffs and the slow, hesitant drumming of He Moves draw a picture of a creature on the prowl, circling around its prey. Some evil energy is moving about here between the notes. The doomy Endlessly Senseless finishes off the first half of the eight-track album and reminds me of the witches of Macbeth who, while brewing deadly potions, spread some eye-opening prophecies.
The second half of the album begins with the doomsday bells of Crossing which announce someone’s passing and sober up the atmosphere. No one should have to die alone demand the lyrics accompanied by crescendos of sound and haunting screams. The eerie video to the track, shot in black and white, shows leafless forests, wilted, rotten crops, barren land and a veiled widow in a Victorian era black dress. Briefly, two other figures appear, a hooded priest and another male figure, creating a strange, nightmarish dynamic and evoking scenarios like they play out in Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter.
The uncanny lament is followed by my favourite track, Druh, which employs Motörhead-ish tempos and riffs, modified by a dash of black metal meanness, to tell the story of a Polish resistance fighter. The storm of sound reaches its hight with the totally unhinged Wired where the vocal performance reaches a new intensity, throwing off all shackles.
After this fury of sound, a heavy melancholia settles in with the last track Without You making the album and its actors come full circle.
A very good surprise indeed.
(8/10 Slavica)
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