Review & Full Album Stream: Serpents of Secrecy, Ave Vindicta
[Click play above to stream Serpents of Secrecy’s Ave Vindicta in full. Album is out on Halloween through Moving the Earth Records.]
Releasing an album can be an emotionally loaded experience in the best of contexts, so one struggles to approach Serpents of Secrecy‘s Ave Vindicta imagining how it might feel for the members of the band. The roots of the project go back to 2012/2013, with earlier lineups featuring members of Alabama Thunderpussy, Gypsy Chief Goliath, and When the Deadbolt Breaks, but at the core of the group was the rhythm section of drummer Chuck Dukehart III (Foghound, ex-Sixty Watt Shaman) and bassist Rev. Jim Forrester (also later Foghound, ex-Sixty Watt Shaman), and expectations for Serpents of Secrecy were essentially shunted when Forrester was murdered in late 2017. That horrific context in no small part defined Foghound‘s most recent LP, 2018’s Awaken to Destroy (review here), and as the Baltimore/greater-Maryland underground heavy community continues to grieve, it defines Ave Vindicta as well — perhaps all the more so because of the potential shown in the record’s 11-track/52-minute run.
Serpents of Secrecy‘s debut LP and possible swansong — one never knows — arrives with the lineup of Dukehart, Forrester, vocalist Mark Lorenzo (Zekiah, Crawler), and guitarists Steve Fisher (Borracho) and Todd Ingram (Pimmit Hills, who were formerly King Giant), the latter of whom is a founding member as well. Their collective pedigree makes them something of a Chesapeake Watershed supergroup, and with the production of J. Robbins at the Magpie Cage (also guest keys on “Bleeding Still”) as a sixth member in terms of bringing the album to light, the sense throughout Ave Vindicta is all the more complete, dynamic, and purposeful. As a straight-up, sans-nonsense heavy rock and roll band, they hit all their marks, rolling out at a nod with the six-minute title-track before the bass opens “Heel Turn” with a post-Clutch groove that Lorenzo meets with due burl en route to the semi-Southern “The Cheat” — a sound still more Maryland than Carolina; if you know what I mean — and “Time Crushes All,” which is the longest inclusion on the outing at 7:36 and veers between calm and volatility all the while giving the melody space to flourish before the wash of crash turns raw at the last apex, giving a beastly finish to the opening salvo. Ass meet boot.
And that was always going to be the story of this band. For what they’re delivering — and let’s be frank and say it’s not a stylistic reinvention of form as much as an offering made for the joy of these players combining their influences and writing the best songs they can because that’s what they’re driven to do; they’re not concerned with shifting genre paradigms here and they don’t — Serpents of Secrecy were going to be a no-doubter from the outset, and even through the various lineup changes that brought them to the five-piece of Dukehart, Forrester, Ingram, Fisher and Lorenzo, that remained the case. As Ave Vindicta give its first breather in the instrumental “Lament” ahead of barreling through “Warbird’s Song” and the moody-but-also-huge “Orphan’s Dream,” finally breaking out the cowbell on “Dealer’s Choice” — and leading with it, no less — it is a promise being fulfilled. In the sureness of their hooks and the impact with which their material lands, Serpents of Secrecy not only fill out what they teased on 2017’s Uncoiled – The Singles two-tracker (which featured what seem to have been the same recordings of “Warbird’s Song” and “The Cheat,” with guest organ from Mark Calcott on the latter), but pay off the years of expectation preceding them.
What do you do with that at this point? I won’t feign impartiality here — I was always going to like this record and I do — but it’s hard to listen to it too. I knew Forrester in kind of a secondary way, through his music and being in touch over his years in his various bands. We spoke a few weeks before he was killed. He was a complex person. He had a dark side and a light side completely separate from his on-stage persona of the tongue-wagging, up-front bass player engaging the crowd, calling you “brother,” and so on. He was sweet, and someone worthy of missing as he is missed. If you didn’t know him, or you don’t know that Ave Vindicta arrives as a posthumous release for the bassist, it’s entirely possible listen blind to that mournful aspect of it. I suspect that most people who hear it won’t be so fortunate, but having known Forrester even to the extent that I did, there’s no way he would have ever wanted this material to languish, unheard, unreleased, in the event of his death or anything else. It is right and proper that Ave Vindicta sees release in homage to him.
The album’s final movement begins with “Dealer’s Choice,” which brings back guest organ alongside the noted “cowbell,” and moves into the more spacious “Bleeding Still” before the final pair “Broke the Key” and “In the Lock” round out, the penultimate track finding Lorenzo doing his best oldschool Life of Agony while the sees him taking on the role of a dollar-hungry preacher — “the salvation van is rolling, but a lack of gas money can stop it” — as the band jams out behind. It’s good fun, and indicative of the cathartic reasoning behind putting out Ave Vindicta in the first place. It’s a look at what was and what might’ve been from Serpents of Secrecy. It’s entirely possible that the band may decide to continue in some form, and certainly they have that right, but Ave Vindicta is as much a final word on the years it took to bring it about as it is a demonstration of the group’s potential. One suspects that if the album had come out in 2018, the five-piece would already be at work on a follow-up, if not already doing shows to support that next release, but then, what might’ve been is nothing if not an underlying theme to what actually is in this case. Whatever happens or doesn’t from this point on, this is a record that summarizes, earns, owns and deserves its moment.
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