HARDWARES

Great cover, with a big matte mouth dripping with spot-varnished blood. Dax of course is the legendary mad poet from Acid Bath and the even more masterful Agents Of Oblivion (the man’s best balance of volume and crooked croonery to date – a 10 without breaking a sweat). Thence he was on to Deadboy & The Elephantmen, which was only two and sorta three people anyway, and now he’s intriguingly dropped that difficult name, but turned in a similar record, if heavier, more electric, more effort. It’s short again though, dammit, 35 starved minutes, but the songs are fairly full up and produced, eschewing the often tossed demo quality of some of the Deadboy stuff. In a word, it rules, with Dax warbling away feverishly with those singular pipes not of this earth about all manner of bloody death-fecund nightmarishness that a drugged swamp-dweller might hallucinate up after gittin’ snakebit. Definitely not a metal album, but Dax is one of the coolest dudes who used to be metal, not to mention the fact that Acid Bath freaked everybody out, with Dax being the hellbound and hounded eye of the storm. And like I say amongst the swampy folk and blues on here, there’s some stomping garage rock, and yes, blood everywhere.