Bibilic Blood, Pale Face Destroyer: Horror Doom Goes Scalping
In ways that few albums can claim to be, Bibilic Blood’s Pale Face Destroyer is encapsulated in its artwork. Take a base layer of loose but still colorful psychedelia, and on top of that, throw a huge monolith of stone, and then finally top it off with a crudely-drawn pencil image of otherworldly violence, heads on pikes; the titular Indian ghost straight out of prairie nightmares. Translate it to audio and that’s basically what the duo of Wizard (drums, guitar) and Suzy Psycho (bass, vocals) have to offer. Pale Face Destroyer is the creepiest record I’ve heard since Pig Destroyer’s Terrifyer, and though the two have practically nothing in common sonically, they manage to unsettle on a basic sub-sexual level that is unmistakable. Bibilic Blood’s music touches you in the bad place.
And when I said “crudely drawn” above, that wasn’t a slight on the cover at all, it actually rules and captures what the Eastlake, Ohio, pair are going for perfectly. These are aesthetic choices the band has made. Likewise, the sound of Pale Face Destroyer is rudimentary — a rough home recording — coming on more like an obscure death metal demo played at half-speed than even the relative gloss of so-called “horror metal” albums. Wizard’s guitar is tuned so low it sounds like the strings are hanging off, and there are at least two solos playing out on “Nightmare Bitch,” maybe three, which only further affects the atmosphere of mental chaos and unbalance. “Nightmare Bitch,” the longest cut at 6:56, is my pick of the album. Its recording sound is inconsistent with the rest of the record, but with Bibilic Blood, the less cohesive it is, the better. The whole point of Pale Face Destroyer seems to be an indiscriminate tearing down of convention. If it sounded good, sounded consistent, made sense, it wouldn’t work. Plus there’s crying babies sampled and reverbed, and that shit is just disturbing.
At 42:22, Pale Face Destroyer is almost too much to take. Suzy Psycho’s vocals would be an element drawing the songs together, but there’s not much to grasp onto in terms of structure, and often they’re so far back in the mix or buried under the guitar noise, bass and drums, or relegated to indecipherable moans or shouts, that they’re little comfort at all. Even the two present Neil Young covers (“Love” and “Southern Man”) are rendered unrecognizable by the cruel treatment they receive at the hands of Bibilic Blood. Tracks like howling-infused “Black Hole” and the über-lurching/quickly-fading “Anasazi Astronaut” revel in their dirty, blistering approach, making Pale Face Destroyer almost completely inaccessible, brutal in a class of its own, and a lot of fun for being both of those things. It’s the record you pull out when someone tells you how heavy this or that band is. An “oh yeah?” record.
It’s also a record the appeal of which is going to be extremely limited. Not everyone is going to be up for the challenge or able to vibe with the kind of aural misanthropy Bibilic Blood propagate, and I can’t imagine the band would want it any other way. For the few who will see its appeal, Pale Face Destroyer has a whole house of horrors to unload into your ears, testing patience, endurance and the bounds of common decency along the way down the road of dissected psychosis. The aura of dread Bibilic Blood purvey is unique almost entirely unto itself, and Pale Face Destroyer is every ounce the threat it promises to be.
Tags: Bibilic Blood, Eastlake, Ohio, Unsigned bands
