Clutch: From Beale Street to Oblivion

Clutch: From Beale Street to Oblivion

2007

DRT Entertainment

Format I Own it on: Compact Disc

Track Listing: 1. You Can't Stop Progress  2. Power Player  3. The Devil & Me  4. White's Ferry  5. Child of the City  6. Electric Worry  7. One Eye Dollar  8. Rapture of Riddley Walker  9. When Vegans Attack  10. Opossum Minister  11. Black Umbrella  12. Mr. Shiny Cadillackness



Man, Clutch was on a roll at this point...Again, I put this on par with "Blast Tyrant" and "Robot Hive/Exodus." Those three albums were so consistent, it's hard for me not to view them as one monumental work...To me this is the pinnacle of their classic rock style, a good deal of it closely resembling the blues covers that ended "Robot Hive"... 

The best song here is "Electric Worry," which is just big-balled power blues...Seriously, has anyone rocked the blues this hard?  And I know the band has used harmonica before but not like this. This is  staggering...Oh yea, I should probably look up who plays harmonica on this...They deserve some of those mad, mad props...

(Apparently it's a gentleman named Eric Oblander, who is the harmonica player for the band Five Horse Johnson...I had never heard them before, but I listened to a couple of the songs online  a minute ago...Heavy blues-rock, sounds a lot like "From Beale Street..." actually...A little more traditional and less monstrous than Clutch though...)

I can remember picking up this album for the first time and looking at the song title, "When Vegans Attack" and cringing a little...I was kinda afraid to hear it...Turns out it's another one of my favorite songs on this album...That slide guitar playing is so cool and catchy and it turns out the lyrics are pretty amusing too...In retrospect I should have remembered that this was a band that had previously pulled off a song entitled "Army of Bono" with little difficulty.  I think my Vegan food pyramid would probably look like this...

 Doritos are vegan food, right?

They also toss in a re-do of "One Eye Dollar." I guess, there's no real point to this, since it doesn't vary that greatly from the original, but dammit, I like the song...It's so jivey and happy...I'd be okay with them  putting it on every album...Hell, they could even put out an album called "Forty One Eye Dollars for the Price of One" consisting of of nothing but  various versions of "One Eye Dollar" and there's a fair chance I might pick it up...

I don't really feel like going on and on all day about this album, I'm really craving some Doritos right now, so to sum things up, rock, rock, rock, rock, rock, rock, rock...

Here's "Electric Worry" by Clutch....Did I mention "rock"?