Dragging Down the Enforcer

That's right, this is Eyehategod with the only difference being a lack of guitarist Jimmy Bower, who was playing in Down at the time. This left Brian Patton to take over the main responsibility of guitars while Eyehategod's bassist Gary Mader backed him up. Mike Williams and Joe LaCaze are still around for this one doing what they've always done, screaming and smashing, respectively. This band and this album are an add-on to the Eyehategod saga. It draws in some more obvious punk influences than before, but otherwise this feels pretty much the same as Eyehategod. Though Outlaw Order delivers this sound in a considerably simpler package.

This album holds true to the distinctive stress-loaded and mud-caked aura of Eyehategod with fat guitars, heavy use of cymbals, and spiteful rasps being used for vocals. However, this only really works as a base description of this. A lot of the music on here is simpler. By that, I mean that the songs are shorter, the riffs are very stripped-down, and they tend to have a one-track focus on striking the listener down and pummeling them in a haze of addled fury. While this is all fine and good, the songs just feel like one battery after another of continuous sludge without much in the way of new turns to these grooves. I'm aware that this band's motif is very simple, but you need to add some standout riffs, mosh sections, notable solos, a strong mood to compliment those, something interesting to keep my attention, and not have me walking off to get a purer dose from the EHG albums. This is still a threatening album with a badass disposition, as the ominous sustained notes with drum fills starting off "Double Barrel Solves Everything" or the mud-snaking riffs on "Walking Papers" prove. Joey LaCaze creates a lot of chaos with his drum fills and they keep the activity of this album up and well. A lot of these songs are fun to bash along to, but they are merely okay compared to the much nastier and more infectious stuff these guys can produce. Many of these songs also tend to run together in their punk-like rush to cause chaos.

This simplification, but trueness to style leaves Outlaw Order's Dragging Down the Enforcer feeling satisfactory, but also peripheral as well. It's the sort of thing that someone on the hunt for more Eyehategod would jump at but would just exist as a footnote in both EHG's history and in the history of sludge metal as a whole. You'll still get plenty of opportunities to embrace madness and go on a rampage. This is simply another okay outing that could have ironed itself out a little better.

Sometimes it doesn't make much sense to 'review' a certain kinds of music because it's not asking you to analyze it, but wants you to shut up, shut off your brain, and just go fucking wild. When you think of a typical music 'review,' I'm sure many people think of media like Rolling Stone, Spin, Pitchfork Media, etc., where music is measured by some arm-chair bourgeois 'thinker,' and the sentences they write are deliberately complicated just so an average music fan can't figure out what the sentences really mean. I definitely enjoy a lot of 'thinking' music too, and intellectually stimulating reviews are always welcome, but I got a really soft spot for lower-class, primitive, and raw music. Why? Because when it's done right and when it kicks ass, straightforward and rowdy music is the sweetest fuck-you to the pretentiousness that plague the music media and the large populations that won't see through that. As a result, it's kind of ironic to attempt to intellectually review an anarchist, anti-mainstream, and anti-bourgeois album.

But enough bullshit from me...

Outlaw Order's first full-length album is a no-bullshit, straight-to-the-point album clocking less than 30 minutes. And these guys sure are pist off at everything. Unlike their main band though, they're not being the chronically lazy, forever-nihilist god haters here. Instead they sound like dangerously proactive, forever-anarchist cop haters who dedicated their lives to bring the world's attention to the injustices within the justice system through provocative means.

Kudos goes out especially to Brian Patton and Joey LaCaze. The world always treated Jimmy Bower as the face of Eyehategod, and Patton always seemed to be in the shadows of Bower in that band, even though Patton's always been a brilliant guitarist himself. Here, Patton assumes much more responsibility, handling both guitar and bass for the recording process. Although Gary Mader might have had a lot of input in writing riffs as well, Patton comes up with a lot of ugly and catchy riffs that you'd wonder how much of EHG songs Patton might have actually written. 00% (nickname of the band) is a great affirmation that Eyehategod really isn't just about Jimmy Bower, but a band with just as much input from Patton as well. It's also a proof that Patton really is a versatile guitarist, given that this band also don't sound much like Soilent Green either, despite his strong creative control in both bands. Joey's drumming is actually a bit of surprise too, particularly on the title track, where he busts out a pounding, pseudo-death-metal blast beat. That's just not something you expect out of a guy who made a career out of drumming in one of the slowest metal band to grace the United States. Great drumming performance overall in this record.

Mike Williams delivers his expected goods too. Like the Arson Anthem EP that was released nearly a year before, he screams a perfect hybrid of punk and metal vocal styles. This is the first full-length album that Williams have been involved in since EHG's "Confederacy of Ruined Lives" released in 2000, and frankly, he was sorely missed this past 8 years. His prowess at penning venomous strings of words are very much alive here, as proven by compelling song titles. You can't help but to be frustrated by the lack of lyrics provided, and like all of Williams' previous record outputs, you wish that you could understand all that he's saying in each songs because you just know that this guy isn't your average metal/punk lyricist with stale and cliched statements.

Unfortunately, this album is not, by any means, a masterpiece. It's highly likable, but it does have a feel like the whole album has not been put together with enough thoughts going into it. That is ironic, because it's precisely that artistic attitude that makes this record sound so good and real, but also allowed a couple of songs to make its way into the album even though they were not as well-writen as some of the other songs. This is especially crucial and disappointing when 2 out of 11 tracks are "intro" and "outro," each consisting of a less-than-a-minute-long noises and spoken words. Additionally, the metal case for the album is cool, but it jacked up the price of the album, and given the content, it's really not flattering. In fact, I was furious about the money I spent on DDTE, with respect to the quality of the record as a whole (I did warm up to it much more after a while, and hence the high score).

Overall this is a highly satisfying album - who knew that Outlaw Order could sound like Eyehategod, yet NOT SOUND LIKE A CLONE OF Eyehategod? 00% have more in common with punk while Eyehategod leaned more on metal. Once your ears become familiar with 00%, you cannot mistake their songs from Eyehategod's. It is more distinguishable than you expect it to be. It's a bit too brief, but with an album like this, it's better to be too brief rather than to drag, and the statement the record makes is strong and convincing. Standout tracks include "Double Barrel Solves Everything," "Alcohol Tobacco Firearms," "Narco Terroristos," "Siege Mentality," and the title track. Every songs boast plenty of syncopated blues groove a-la punk aesthetics, but these are the best. I especially like the swinging southern-groove intro and the snarly hardcore punk sound that follows in "Alcohol Tobacco Firearms," which is probably my favorite moment of the album.

This is the time period where punk is nearly dead and heavy metal is either plagued with generic concepts (lamb of god, trivium, etc.), or obsessed with fantasy (i.e. black, viking, folk, or prog metal), or both at once. Outlaw Order might not be "new" to knowledgeable fans, but is a breath of fresh air in such a metal world (that's true even if Eyehategod was highly active), and their album is a rare sonic experience that offers a sense of urgency and realism that is sorely lacking from heavy metal of late 2000s. This band embodies the unnerving realities of the relationship between the American lower class and the bureaucracy so well and with such ease, it makes it funny that other bands like Megadeth and Slayer tries so hard to convey similar things in their music, yet utterly fail each time they try. While Dragging Down the Enforcer might not have been the best album of 2008, it definitely deserves at least some recognition as one of the better release - i.e. honorable mention of 2008.

Be sure to catch these guys live also. I had the privilege of seeing them in Austin at a Pentagram reunion show. If you ever wanted to mosh for an Eyehategod song, this is your chance.

Outlaw Order is a new band featuring 4 of the 5 members of legendary New Orleans sludge crew Eyehategod. With the entire band apart from Jimmy Bower coming together, Outlaw Order has been riding some pretty high expectations with this album.

First of all, Dragging down the Enforcer is not an Eyehategod album. Sure, the sludge, the stoned southern riffs and the Black Sabbath meets punk/ hardcore energy are all present and accounted for but that feeling of slightly unhinged aggression that made those Eyehategod albums so completely brilliant is missing. Instead, what we get is a concise, more focused approach that is pretty similar to the last Soilent Green album but not as consistently good.

The sludge is thick and threatens to overpower everything else but at the same time, it’s tightly reined in by the hardcore aggression on this record. The occasional Sabbath-y riff simply serves to break the tension and give the music some breathing space.
Stand out tracks include Safety Off which is basically the same awesome doom riff played for close to four minutes with minor variations on the theme, the superb Alcohol Tobacco Firearms which is a furious mix of southern groove and hardcore fury, Mercy Shot which has a typically mad performance from vocalist Mike Williams and the terrific title song.

I guess the downside to this album is that even with a short running time of less than 40 minutes, the songs tend to get a bit repetitive. It’s all mostly held together by Mike Williams’ consistently terrific vocal performance but at the end of the day, while the music on offer is similar to Eyehategod in a lot of ways, it’s not that brilliant. The band tends to follow the same pattern on most of the songs on the album and overall, while there are some great tracks scattered across the album, it doesn’t really make Dragging down the Enforcer essential.

Eyehategod fans and also fans of the NOLA sound will find plenty to chew on here and Dragging down the Enforcer is pretty good too. It’s just not as brilliant as I thought it would be.

Originally written for http://www.kvltsite.com