It's not very often that I can own an album for a year and feel compelled to play it from start to finish every time I listen to it. in fact, thanks to my five disc changer, this album is rarely out of my CD player.
The overiding factor in Clutch's cult-like following is a trade-off between the original, attention grabbing and often downright oddball vocal stylings of Neil Fallon and the unstoppable riff-machine that is Tim Sult, combined with an unparalelled, story telling style of lyric-writing that has been with them since the beginning.
Blast Tyrant takes this to the next level, with just as much cudos being owed to the bass and drums as to the guitars and vocals, combining bass-lines that wouldn't sound out of place on a Funkadelic album, and rhythms that inject so much groove into the album it hurts, making this a much more complete, polished sounding release than Pure Rock Fury, having sacrificed their live sound for a clearly more studio oriented offering, while retaining more than enough of their originality to keep fans of earlier albums interested.
To sum Blast Tyrant up is a very difficult thing. It has plenty of straighforward, moshable tracks such as The Mob Goes Wild and (Notes From The Trail Of) La Curandera, moody accoustic numbers with a country edge like Regulator and groove laden anthems like Army Of Bono and Cypress Grove that will have even the most hard faced metal-head throwing shapes on the dance-floor. All of course, wrapped up in sublime, thought provoking lyrics, steeped in mysticism and myth.
The high point of the album for me has to be (In The Wake Of) The Swollen Goat, which, while fitting perfectly with the rest of the album, is reminiscent of The Elephant Riders.
The only let down is the final track Wysiwyg, which sounds like a particularly good jam-session that just happened to be recorded, and was stuck on the end of the album as an afterthought. Even so, it doesn't spoil the album one little bit, because if you dont like it, you can just skip it right back to the start again!
In my humble opinion, when it comes to rock, Clutch are the non-parallel, and Blast Tyrant is most definately their magnum-opus.
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