![]() ![]() Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.MetalReview: First of all, thank you so much for taking this up, Jimmy. (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)Ĭatch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. For those of us who want Eyehategod to keep doing this for a long time to come, it’s a welcome evolution. For those who were drawn primarily to Eyehategod’s apocalyptic self-annihilation, History’s unadorned blues riffs and fully legible lyrics might be a bridge too far. Likewise, it’s impossible to listen to A History of Nomadic Behavior without noting that Williams’ cleaned-up life has coincided with his band’s cleaned-up sound. On early Eyehategod records, the songs, production style, and real-life depravity within the band were intertwined to the point of being indistinguishable. Just because he got a new liver doesn’t mean he’s punching his ticket for square society. On closing track and album highlight “ Every Thing, Every Day,” he repurposes the titular refrain of the Take as Needed for Pain classic “ Kill Your Boss” as a fuck-everything climax. ![]() “In that way it’s almost the same as a trigger on a gun, because it’s just as dangerous.” Sobriety aside, Williams hasn’t lost the piss-and-vinegar nihilism that made him a hero to dropouts and deadbeats in the early ’90s. “Anytime I’ve been to rehab or AA or NA, any of that stuff, they always talk about triggers, which can be anything that makes you want to use again,” he writes in the liner notes. On “ High Risk Trigger,” he shrieks about being “ deaf, jagged, and prowling,” like a man who is just barely outrunning his demons. Williams’s newfound sobriety is an undercurrent that runs through the album. That puts the spotlight even more squarely on Williams and Bower, now the only two original members remaining. History is the first Eyehategod full-length to feature Aaron Hill on drums Patton wasn’t replaced, making the band a four-piece for the first time. Drummer and founding member Joey LaCaze passed away shortly before the release of 2014’s Eyehategod, and longtime guitarist Brian Patton left the fold in 2018. Sadly, not everyone made it to the jam session. If 1996’s Dopesick sounded like overhearing an entire band going through heroin withdrawals together, History sounds like those same dudes reuniting years later to jam at the local VFW hall on a Wednesday night. Jimmy Bower’s detuned blues riffs stand front and center alongside Williams, still full of his trademark bends and vibrato but now with far fewer deliberate feedback squalls to drown out the notes. Williams has honed his formerly indecipherable howl into a pointed weapon he wants you to hear every word he’s singing. Though they’ve historically buried their songs in enough filth to leave you nauseous, the production on History is crisp and clear. A History of Nomadic Behavior emphasizes that fact more directly than any Eyehategod record to date. Even when Eyehategod was essentially inventing sludge metal on feedback-drenched early albums like 1990’s In the Name of Suffering and 1993’s Take as Needed for Pain, they were fundamentally a blues band.
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