Eyehategod
Confederacy of Ruined Lives
Century Media
With a band like Eyehategod, you’ve just gotta be a fan, because otherwise, sludge this caustic could rightfully impede one’s everyday functioning. And with album titles as In the Name of Suffering, Take As Needed for Pain, Dopesick, and, now, their newest, Confederacy of Ruined Lives, the treacherous terrain is more than mapped out, the cesspool waters more than roped off before the intrepid soul takes that life-damning first step into degenerative life- and thought-processes. Much like Big (Un)Easy neighbors Crowbar (see review this issue; both have occasionally swapped members, go figure), Eyehategod (g)rumbles along cantankerously and consistently on Confederacy of Ruined Lives, its members holding on for dear life, the final thread of humanity, sanity, whatever-ity fraying away before a life of bad drugs, bad hygiene, and bad decibels shifts from a career move to a chronic condition, all this amazingly after an undoubtedly rough four years since their previous Dopesick, arguably their finest 45 minutes of “music.” Predictable, yeah; morbidly enjoyable, an even louder yeah, but I guess you could call me a “fan.” The bleakly and blackly distinctive practitioners of the genre lovingly called “hate sludge,” mainly because they’ve got a lot of “fans,” Eyehategod loudly stake their claim for new millennium ethics of living by rendering upwardly mobile ambitions moot, thereby pronouncing “life sucks shit” as the new words to live – and in the case of their fans, die – by, so maybe it’s a good thing for overpopulation that they’ve got a lot of ‘em.
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