Acid Bath
Paegan Terrorism Tactics
Rotten Records
Alongside similarly inclined malcontents like Eyehategod, Crowbar, Down, and Exhorder, Acid Bath defined a sludgy, feral “Louisana” sound in the ’90s. Acid Bath had an unhealthy obsession with the darkest extremities of the civilized world: death, depression, man’s cruelty to his fellow man. And Acid Bath cloaked those lyrical themes in a doomy, dirty, heavily distorted rumble that suddenly burst forth with the agile spryness of thrash metal, before settling back into the tarpits to suffer and die. Over all of this, frontman Dax Riggs flayed himself alive. Unlike their peers, Acid Bath had a surfeit of very unexpected vocal melodies. Riggs could do the Alan Dubin-styled throat punishment, only to suddenly bellow out in an oddly tuneful Eddie Vedder/Scott Weiland-esque warble, and to tell you the truth, that part just doesn’t work. His bluesy belt is a little too heroic, a little too Creed. Kinda reminds me of why I preferred Exhorder back in the day. Although at first you’re sort of like, “Geez, these guys were more accessible than their peers, they could have been a Queens of the Stone Age, what happened?” Check out the cover, with art by a certain Jack Kevorkian, and…. yeah, cult status forever.
Rotten: http://rottenrecords.com
