Friday Full-Length: Crowbar, Crowbar
Fair to call Crowbar‘s self-titled sophomore LP a classic, I’d think. The album was released in 1993 through Pavement Music as the follow-up to the New Orleans-based band’s 1991 debut, Obedience Thru Suffering, and was notable at the time for being produced by Pantera‘s Philip Anselmo, but it’s the songs that have stood the test of time, in no small part because Crowbar still plays them. I can’t remember seeing the band live that they didn’t play at least “High Rate Extinction” or “All I Had I Gave,” if not “Fixation,” “Self-Inflicted,” “Existence is Punishment” or “I Have Failed,” and that’s more than half the record’s 10-song tracklist some fraction of which might feature in a given night’s setlist. The songs are still relevant for the band, is what I’m saying, before you get to the genre-defining influence Crowbar have had on sludge metal — they and Eyehategod should feature in New Orleans tourism ads — and their impact remains visceral.
“High Rate Extinction” sets the chug, and the chug is a vital part of what Crowbar is about. Topped with guitarist Kirk Windstein‘s clenched-stomach barks switching from channel to channel, before smoothing out for a rolling chorus, Windstein and Matt Thomas‘ guitars are immediately central to the proceedings, and while the world outside was consumed by grunge and the beginnings of ‘heavy’ as something distinct from metal — even if the language for it wasn’t there yet — Crowbar seemed to exist in both worlds, and their aggression was as much about the inward searching of their lyrics as the impact of the instrumental lurch that often but not always accompanied, but generally seemed to because the tones were so goddamned heavy.
Like perhaps some others of a certain age, I found Crowbar on Beavis and Butt-Head. I would’ve been maybe 11 or 12 at the time, and Beavis’ approval carried weight as regards opinion leadership. Crowbar at that point featured Todd Strange on bass and Craig Nunenmacher on drums alongside Windstein and Thomas, and while it would be years before I eventually picked up the album, there was always an awareness of who Crowbar were and what they were about. When I finally got there, it was like they’d been waiting for me all along, brooding and volatile, the very epitome of ‘crunch’ in their sound. I had a friend at WSOU who was so into them that the association still lingers these 20-plus years after the fact. I guess what I’m saying is Crowbar‘s Crowbar is an album you can live with, grow with. It’s not perfect. The production is raw compared to subsequent efforts in the band’s 12-LP catalog, and its dudely contemplations operate from a gender framework that feels dated, but again, the songs are undeniable.
Whether it’s the landmark from-the-depths rumble of “All I Had (I Gave)”
or the even-harder-landing “Will That Never Dies” right after, the dare of melody throughout that comes to the forefront on the nodding cover of Led Zeppelin‘s “No Quarter” — which I’ll take over the original every single time — or the fact that “Holding Nothing” is three minutes and 11 seconds long and is so heavy it seems to take at least twice that, the material on Crowbar is varied in approach and dynamic in tempo, but informed by a sound so distinctive that it draws together as one 35-minute entirety. Gritty and tumultuous, “Negative Pollution” or “Will That Never Dies” might be called proto-crushing, but the two cuts on either end of the LP each have their own purpose, and as rough as they are, there’s no lack of expressiveness or emotionality to them. There’s more than chestbeating going on, and even that level of emotional complexity was a reach for something so metal at the time, however hyper-masculine it might seem in hindsight.
A not-insignificant portion of Crowbar‘s legacy comes from this record, and it set a template for methodology that one could argue they’ve been working from ever since — which isn’t to accuse them of trying to do the same thing over and over, necessarily; they have a defined sound, know it, and have been able to deliver it for more than three decades; this is commendable, not the least because they kick ass — to some degree or other. But you can also hear the underpinnings of hardcore punk in Crowbar‘s early sludge, and while their primary impact would be on the next generation of metalcore purveyors — close associations with Jamey Jasta of Hatebreed, and so on — Crowbar never really have gotten the credit they’ve deserved for the intricacies of their approach, perhaps as a result of being so outwardly bludgeoning. Can’t have everything, I suppose.
But the self-titled is something of a given in my mind. A record I take and have taken for granted for years — it’s always there, waiting, but I’ve heard the songs live more than on the CD in the last decade — its solidity is unflinching, and it shouldn’t be seen as a coincidence that so many of their covers feature classic-style art and architectural elements, in addition to often representing their New Orleans roots. They’re speaking to that same carved-in-marble, painted-in-oil sensibility in their music. Anachronistic in terms of what was the trend in both pop-rock and the metallic underground of its day, Crowbar sounds like it was made to stand the test of time, and it has. Never pretentious despite the philosophizing, and never so deep in its own head as to lose sight of the song in question, it’s the kind of tape you’d buy and perhaps be surprised to find how much it informed your taste going forward.
It would be a couple years after this that Windstein (whose work has held up) and Anselmo (whose yarl and white-supremacist-adjacent antics are distinctly less appealing) would take part in Down with Pepper Keenan from C.O.C. and Jimmy Bower from the already-mentioned Eyehategod, and I won’t deny that band’s effect in terms of leading listeners from more mainstream metal into the heavy underground, but Crowbar‘s Crowbar is like the treasure there for that audience to discover as they made their way deeper into the cavernous world of sludge and doom. For me, it’s among the reasons I’m most glad to have been a part of Generation Beavis.
As always, I hope you enjoy. If you want something more recent from Crowbar, their latest outing is 2022’s Thanks for reading.
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Limping to the finish this week, I admit. I had intended to have a Mammoth Volume review up today — release day for them, also Delving and some other cool stuff — but I got no time to write yesterday beyond an initial four sentences, and that was it. I ended up putting together today’s Howling Giant and Ken Wohlrob posts stoned on the couch later in the evening, largely braindead just from the drain of the day (if not the gummy), and that was it. I did my best. The Mammoth Volume might get reviewed Monday or might get stuck in the next Quarterly Review.
That, I was hoping would be early September, but looking at the calendar this week I realized that was both dumb and impossible. The kid goes back to school day after Labor Day, so that week is out because it will be insane — she’s starting first grade, and if it’s anything like the start of kindergarten, which I very much hope it isn’t, my attention will be needed in supporting that — and then you get into Desertfest New York and other things I’ve already committed to. I’ve currently got two weeks slated for the next QR; the week starting Sept. 30 and the week starting Oct. 7, and it’s mostly full. If that’s when it ends up being, fine. I could maybe do the week before? I don’t know. I’ll look at it again today if I have two fucking seconds and any energy whatsoever. Which is a maybe.
All of that has inevitably led me to the question of how much I still need to be doing this, how much I need to dedicate the time I have to The Obelisk as opposed to, say, being a more engaged parent right at this very moment I’m typing, or doing or thinking about any number of other things throughout the course of a day. I know for a fact that I could very easily go the rest of my life without ever looking at my email again. I don’t think I’d mind that. But I’m still here, and I think if I didn’t feel like I needed to be here, I wouldn’t be so bummed out about not having the time in the first place. Maybe it was my own navelgazing that put Crowbar’s “weak man weak mind” in my head this week. Or maybe I just thought about what to close the week with yesterday at the playground with The Pecan and decided to roll with it since I hadn’t done it before. You decide.
It’s starting to be cold at night and in the early mornings as of this week. Fall is coming. Sending The Patient Mrs. off to a new semester and The Pecan, as noted, off to first grade will alleviate some of my temporal concerns — not that I sit around all day on the laptop, but when I’m home alone for upwards of six or eight hours, somehow writing time comes more easily; go figure — but there’s another week before that happens, and The Patient Mrs. was out every night this week between Board of Education meetings, her own work, and social obligation. I don’t know what’s on for next week — for her, anyhow; here I’ve got premieres for Vast Pyre, Wall, maybe-Stöner and Free Ride slated, and I’m going to try to review either that Mammoth Volume or some Psychedelic Source Records jams for Monday — but as always I’ll do my best to do as much as possible, even if I find the results of that effort disappointing by my own, probably unreasonable standard. I wish I wrote more. Tattoo it on my fucking forehead. Or maybe wrap it around my mostly-bare skull since I did manage to get the clippers out last week and tame the mess on my dome that, sad to say, is the only part of me doing anything closely resembling ‘thinning’ at this point in my life. Don’t get me started.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Drink water, find solace, whatever you need to do, do it as best you can. I’ll be writing and trying to catch up on email, feigning relevance for anyone other than myself as I do. Thanks for reading.
FRM.
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Tags: Crowbar, Crowbar Self-titled, Louisiana, New Orleans, Pavement Music, self-titled
Hell yes, good reason to give this album a spin. Been a while.