"
Black Heart Blues is the missing link between hardcore and blues rock". Shut your filthy idiot mouths, PR monkeys. Black fucking
Sabbath are three-and-a-half decades thataway. Leave decent bands alone to stand up under their own power, without making up shit that's only going to annoy people.
This album's an eye-opener, and no mistake. There's a curious sort of melodic brutality about it—curious because people shouldn't be able to
do things like this. Abrasive screeching has never sounded so good. 3 Stages of Pain have an extremely versatile sound, one which allows them to play fun games of juxtaposition. As a result they've produced a dynamic, interesting clutch of tunes that suck you right in.
Dirty White Shoes is a pretty fucking ballsy start to a record, two minutes of unrelenting noise with five or six distinct hooks buried in it. Big fat riffs, cracking drums...I have to admit, it had me worried. "What if that's it?" I thought. "What if they've just blown everything at once, and the rest of the album's toss?" Fat chance. Things don't get better, necessarily—
Dirty White Shoes is the high point of the album—but they get different, and interesting, and (for the most part) consistently good.
Black Heart Blues has a hell of a lot of depth to it.
The title track is an eight-minute effort that drops the tempo and lets some more varied influences come to the fore, with a slower, stripped down section sandwiched between leaden slabs of guitar.
Thee Universe is a fat-riffed sludgy number that pisses all over Sabbath's countless imitators from the top of a multi-storey car-park. Or somewhere similarly high. And solid. And concrete-y.
The album has a couple of lows: some poor track had to follow
Dirty White Shoes, and
Am An Yeller simply can't keep pace with the ferocity of the opener.
I'd Pay to See You Naked misses the mark somewhat, and ends up boring as a result. Closing track
Seconds Later (They Suddenly Die) more than makes up for this, though, with the guest vocals (from 27's Maria Christopher) adding a touch of fragility to the slow, rambling menace that neatly caps off this beast of a record.
3 Stages of Pain are not to be missed. Their sound, while unmistakably hardcore, often veers off into the hypnotic, groove-laden territory of Soundgarden and early Therapy?. Don't let the fact that their guitarist used to play bass for Groop Dogdrill put you off.
Black Heart Blues is out now on
Undergroove.
http://www.3stagesofpain.co.uk/
