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Church Of Misery: Houses of the unholy

24/04/09 || GardensTale

Groove metal is a terrible genre misnomer. You’d think that with a genre name like that, the music would always be about fucken GROOVE. Yet, oftentimes, all the bands that got a label ‘groove metal’ stamped to their collective foreheads just have some fucken fuzzy guitar sound and a lot of riffs.

Church of Misery should be like, the fucken archetype of groove metal. The only band I know of with a comparable amount of groove is the both loved and hated Clutch. They actually sound pretty alike, so that’s no surprise. The fact that CoM are from fucken Japan is though. You pop this album in and from the moment the first riffs call an end to the useless intro and a beginning to the fucken groove-fest, everything about this band screams American, from the heavy thundering guitars pounding out catchy southern heavy-fucken-metal to the rough bark of Hideki Fukasawa. The guy is fucking weird. Sounds more American than 95% of the Americans, with a thick southern accent and a very thick whiskey-and-cigs gravel patch in throat, yet he looks like a smaller Dio (…) from Asia in sunglasses and a big camo-coat. Check him out, third guy from the left on this picture of the band. What the fuck?

As mentioned, CoM play their metal in a style pretty reminiscent of Clutch, but it’s faster, louder and harder, dropping most (but not all) of the funk and bizarre lyrics in favor of serial killer inspired lyrics and more groove. And more groove. And more groove. The groove never fucken stops coming. This thing has more grooves than Clint Eastwood’s face. I know some metalheads seem to have something against groove: fuck them. If you’re one of them: fuck you. You don’t need to headbang to this; your head will be banged for you. Excellent to raise a beer to as well, thanks to the BIG fucking southern feel. The serial killer lyrics could have very well been about booze, boobs and rock and roll, it wouldn’t have fit any less. Speaking of which, each of the songs have the name of their inspirational serial killer in brackets. Always fun to Wikipedia when you don’t know about one of them.

The only complaint I really have here is that the long songs get in the way of more variety, which it could have used as by song 5 or 6 it’s generally been enough. It makes the album sound more like a stitched together series of riffs than a nicely varied album with good structure. Because of this, it’s generally more fun stuff to toss into a playlist than to listen to the album in one go.

But fuck it! There’s albums you can’t properly listen to in parts (looking at you, “Dark Side of the Moon”) and there’s albums best listened to sporadically, like a snack. This one’s for the latter category and fucking tasty at that. If you like southern or stoner, if you like to get fucken drunk and bang your head to good solid chunks of metal, grab this baby and you won’t be disappointed.

8 Japs that sound like Americans out of 10.

Information
Released: 2009
Label: Rise Above Records
Website: www.churchofmisery.net
Band
Junji Narita: drums
Tom Satan: guitars
Hideki Fukasawa: vocals, synths
Tatsu Mikami: bass

Tracklist
01. El Padrino (Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo)
02. Shotgun Boogie (James Oliver Huberty)
03. The Gray Man (Albert Fish)
04. Blood Sucking Freak (Richard Trenton Chase)
05. Master Heartache
06. Born to Raise Hell (Richard Speck)
07. Badlands (Charles Starkweather & Caril Fugate)

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