Some albums are pure love-it-or-hate-it material. No fence-sitters, no “well actually…” types — just full devotion or dramatic eye-rolling...
Enter A Blast From the Past ... with Orange Goblin
If
Coup De Grace proves anything, it’s that sometimes a band has to ditch
the safety rails, kick the dust off their boots, and barrel full-tilt
into the sunset with only riffs, attitude, and a “to hell with subtlety”
grin. After the mixed reactions to The Big Black, Orange Goblin didn’t course-correct
— they doubled down, swerved hard, and came back sounding like the
bastard child of Motörhead, Kyuss, and a bar fight no one walked away
from clean.
Right
from the jump, “Your World Will Hate This” tears into gear like someone
strapped Motörhead to a rocket. It’s a punk-spiked, no-prisoners
warning shot: keep up or get flattened. “Monkey Panic” follows with a
drunken, brawling groove, the kind of track that staggers forward just
long enough to punch you in the ribs.
“Made
of Rats” is where things get gloriously sun-scorched. John Garcia’s
unmistakable desert howl merges with Joe Hoare’s fuzz-caked guitar like a
Kyuss offshoot that crawled out of a London gutter. Instant classic,
the chorus hitting like a sandstorm wrapped around a fist. “Getting High
on the Bad Times” keeps the momentum rolling like a battered truck on a
never-ending highway, carried by Scott Reeder’s raw,
“played-in-the-room” production style that traps the band like a live
wire in a metal box.
The
heavyweight riff-worship continues with “Born with Big Hands”, a
monolith of a track whose guitar tone feels carved from bedrock. “Red
Web” sharpens the edges with a more metallic, serrated attack, while
“Rage of Angels” drops a righteous slab of 70s-soaked heavy groove that
could sit comfortably alongside the genre’s earliest giants.
Then
there’s “Graviton”, the sun-drenched instrumental breather – less a
break and more the eye of a psychedelic storm. It floats, it hums, it
expands the record’s universe before the band dives headfirst back into
the dirt. And “We Bite”, their Misfits cover, captures perfect punked-up
mayhem, like the band sprinting through a bar fight with wild smiles
and swinging elbows.
Coup
de Grace isn’t polished. It’s a dust-covered, beer-stained love letter
to heavy rock, doom grit, and no-nonsense punk energy. Orange Goblin
sound hungrier, gnarlier, and more alive than ever. A dangerous,
swaggering triumph – and one of those albums that grows sharper,
dirtier, and more irresistible every time you spin it.
-Helge Neumann
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