Corrosion Of Conformity – Good God / Baad Man
Corrosion Of Conformity – Good God / Baad Man
Nuclear Blast
Release Date: 03/04/26
Review by Jon Deaux
8.5/10
Points deducted for making me feel things I wasn’t emotionally prepared for on a Friday afternoon
To be honest with you, when I heard that Corrosion of Conformity was working on a double album, my first thought was to make sure my will was up to date. There is no middle ground with a double album. There is “Zen Arcade”, and then there is “Use Your Illusion II”. There is “Physical Graffiti”, and then there is whatever Queensrÿche put out when no one was paying attention.
‘Good God / Baad Man’ is, I’m happy and scared to report, the former.
‘Good God? / Final Dawn’ starts the whole damn party off with a riff that makes you feel as though you’ve been hit by a pickup truck driven by the ghost of Ronnie Van Zant. This is Corrosion of Conformity staking their claim as heroes… No – as something much older and much nastier than that. Like stumbling upon the fact that your grandfather has been running a crew of bikers out of his ranch for years and respecting the man for it.
You or Me comes next, and it wastes no time whatsoever trying to make you feel special. Pepper Keenan’s vocals have somehow been aged to perfection. Like a man who has witnessed three different generations of Rock music try to devour its own tail and just played his guitar through the whole thing. There is something seriously unhealthy about an album by Corrosion of Conformity sounding as relaxed as they do here while tackling a song as aggressive as ‘You or Me’. These are not a band trying – they’re just lounging around having a good time.
And then there’s ‘Gimme Some Moore’, the lead single, the battle cry, the anthem of a record Pepper and Woody insist they wrote as if they were 17 years old again. And then there’s the slightly disconcerting fact: they’re not wrong. With Al Jourgensen of Ministry fame snarling away in the background vocals like a man who might want to reconsider some of his life choices, and Madonna guitar slinger Monte Pittman completely losing it on the electric guitar, ‘Gimme Some Moore’ assaults you like a brick in a leather jacket with studs. Is the message of struggle and fight worth it, of leather and chains and spikes, the greatest example of idiotic bliss ever committed to tape, or is it some profound statement of intent? By the time you’re 40 seconds in, you’re not going to know what to make of it.
‘The Handler’ is where things start to prove themselves to you, though, and show you there’s substance behind all of this posturing. COC has never been a band that’s been afraid of shifting from head-crushing heavy to almost pathologically sensitive without making you think you’re getting whiplash, and they do it here: the riff plods along, lurches into life, and then settles into a groove that feels genuinely menacing rather than posturingly so.
‘Bedouin’s Hand’ is the kind of song that makes you want to get in a car and drive somewhere, anywhere, without any particular destination in mind, and not tell anyone where you went when you got there. It has that COC quality of being both ancient and utterly contemporary, like reading graffiti scrawled on the walls of a pyramid that somehow relates personally to your life right now.
And then ‘Run For Your Life’ closes out this record with what can only be described as a psychedelic funeral march led by the spoken word of a US combat veteran. It is heavy in ways that most “heavy music” aspires to and fails to achieve. It is, frankly, enormous. It is the kind of track that makes you stand there and stare at the wall for a minute. And I think that is a measure of artistic success.
The second disc kicks off with ‘Baad Man’ and it slithers in like some kind of exploitation film from the ’70s that never got made, all grand funk strut and gutter wisdom. Pepper says it is about some dude who thinks he is a bad man but really ain’t. And I think there is some wonderful self-awareness in this band creating a character piece in the style of the very music that created a thousand real badasses and just as many fake ones. It is going hard and winking at you about it. And I think that is a hard line to walk and they make it look as though it is nothing but a cakewalk. And that is just annoying.
‘Lose Yourself’ comes in and yeah, I know, this is the one that is said to be inspired by their 1996 record “Wiseblood,” and yeah, I can see how that is true. It is short. It is to the point. It is about escaping the crushing machinery of normal life before it turns you into mulch.
‘Mandra Sonos’ is the song that makes you remember that these guys have always been more musically accomplished than their flannel and fury necessarily made you believe. It has texture, space, and a willingness to let the music breathe and get weird. It is, in fact, the album at its most psychedelic, and it is earned.
‘Asleep on the Killing Floor’ is exactly as it says on the tin. It puts you to bed and wakes you up again with a start. COC have always been a band that has understood that it is dynamics that get you, and that it is the moment before impact that is most effective. It is a masterclass in using this.
‘Handcuff County’ is as Southern Gothic as you would expect, and by that, I mean it is the greatest possible compliment. If Flannery O’Connor were a guitar player in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1982, then this is what she would’ve written.
‘Swallowing the Anchor’ (the nautical metaphor is working hard here, and should) is the album at its most driving, its most unstoppable. It moves at a frantic pace, like something is trying to get away from something else, and by COC standards, everything is on fire, and that is just right.
Brickman has all the impact of its namesake and then some, and arrives in the penultimate position on the track list like a last warning before the lights go out.
And then ‘Forever Amplified’ wraps up everything with Anjelika “Jelly” Joseph, a gospel-trained singer from the New Orleans jazz-funk band Galactic. She does something here that is completely outside of what most people would expect from that genre. “It’s a dedication to everybody we’ve lost. It’s a dedication to Reed Mullin, who passed away in January 2020. It’s not heavier because of that. It’s just… it’s what loss is when you’ve been carrying it around long enough. It’s not painful. It’s just… what it is.”
What Corrosion of Conformance has done here is take tragedy, take loss, take the implosion of their original lineup, and take a global pandemic, and sat there for two years in Mississippi, listening to ZZ Top and Discharge, and figuring it all out, and come up with a double album that sounds as if none of that nearly killed them. Which is either a tribute to the superhuman strength of the human spirit, or a sign that Rock and Roll is indeed one of the very few forces in the known universe that can take actual human suffering and turn it into something worth hearing.
This is a record produced by Warren Riker, supposedly at least in part in Barry Gibb’s home studio in Miami, where Pepper Keenan played Maurice Gibb’s actual Stratocaster, and I choose to believe that the spirit of the Bee Gees somehow gets into ‘Baad Man’ in ways that can only be imagined, and yet again: not in a bad way.
‘Good God / Baad Man’ is a messy and confident and heavy and strange and sometimes beautiful in ways that cannot be anticipated until after they have happened to you. It is a record by people who love music, all music, ZZ Top and Black Flag equally, and sounds exactly like that.
Reed Mullin would be proud.
Go ahead and make a mess. Go Maad.
TRACKLISTING:
Disc 1
01.Good God?/Final Dawn
02.You Or Me
03.Gimme Some Moore
04.The Handler
05.Bedouin’s Hand
06.Run for Your Life
Disc 2
01.Baad Man
02.Lose Yourself
03.Mandra Sonos
04.Asleep On the Killing Floor
05.Handcuff County
06.Swallowing the Anchor
07.Brickman
08.Forever Amplified
LINKS:
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