Clutch – Clutch: 25 years of his first work of art

25 years fulfills the first philosopher’s stone of Clutch. Her self-titled album marked a before and after on the scene. Stoner American and marked the first turning point of a band that has never left anything to chance.

Formed in Maryland, the quartet headed by the magnificent frontman and vocal specialist Neil Fallon have on the guitarist Tim slunt, the bassist Dan Maines and the drummer Jean-Paul Gaster superlative allies. His debut was in 1993 with the underrated Transnational Speedway League: Anthems, Anecdotes and Undeniable Truths now with the iconic label EastWest, subsidiary of Warner Bros.. An eclectic album of remarkable quality, harder and darker but with rough diamonds in the form of songs like “A Shogun Named Marcus” and especially “Binge and Purge”.

The quartet’s concerns and the continuous evolution of their styles, characters and skills led them to perfect their debut and just a year and a half later they had already prepared their second full length. Titled of the same name and hidden behind one of its most respected covers, Clutch saw the light on May 9, 1995 also by the hand of EastWest.

The psychedelic, the funk, the blues, the Stoner, the heavy and even the hard rock they were wrapped around this disc possibly better than any other disc ever created. And is that Clutch They touched perfection for the first time in their long career.

At 55 minutes, the album is made up of 13 songs of very different lengths. In it we find a variety of themes with roots in the rock from the 70s with strong riffs loaded with groove. The battery very John Bonham looks great throughout the album and the voices of Fallon They manage to establish a style that has never been detached until now. Cryptic and wacky letters filled with puns punctuate the concept Clutch.

The musicality of the songs was established as the watermark of a band that knows how to play with its most attractive cards. Fallon He is an incredibly skilled vocalist with his strong voice and passionate delivery. In this album we still find some of the moments when Neil uses its most powerful and crude register. The riffs They are catchy when needed and the moments of pure jam They are essential to understand the world of the band in its beginnings.

The strength of this album lies in its tendency to mix soft rhythms with others of complex intensity, thus achieving memorable moments. This is the case even for the softest and most spacious songs that Clutch offers us here, as “Tight Like That” and “Spacegrass”, which present riffs stoned and a powerful delivery of Neil Fallon, whose voice sounds strong and clear every time he opens his mouth.

The most intense songs like “Animal Farm”, “Texan Book of the Dead” and “Escape From the Prison Planet” have very characteristic rhythms that are difficult to skip without falling into the loop. The work with the choirs consist of very well overlapping distorted effects.

Clutch have a rock very noisy that sometimes knows how to sound soft sometimes while still feeling natural, this would be the perfect definition of this work. Heavy and infectious to the extreme with intensive use of fuzzboxes and pedals wah that make music even more Stoner and funky at once. Each song is a memorable delight with incredible hooks and many riffs of pure Rock And Roll.

The album reached 200,000 units sold only in the US, which led to Columbia Records I made them an irrefutable offer to publish their third album.

Beto Lagarda

… metal in all its extensions … the rest is saying