Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Blood Oath” from Down.
Down are in rare company. It is not easy to be a band that releases on average one record every seven and a half years. The acts that can do so and still make a major splash are very few and far between; if I say Tool, how long will it be before you can name a second one? The fact that Down return over a decade after their last released music, having weathered some self-inflicted controversies and subsequent fence-mending, the wavering condition of each of their main bands, and still delivered a song every bit as good as “Lifer,” their debut single over 30 years ago, is quite astonishing.
“Blood Oath” slips through the fingers on attempts to describe it. It’s Sabbathian, yes, but it manages to fuse elements of Ozzy, Dio, and even Tony Martin era work, both vocally and musically. It lives in the dire and doomy sludge terrain of New Orleans, the home of many of these players, singer Philip Anselmo included, but it also gestures to the great English bands of the style and even little bits from the wave of progressive doom bands heavily inspired by bands like Down.
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An even more impressive feat, however, is how strenuous it is to gain these little critical insights due to how utterly compelling and engrossing the song is. I don’t want to leave that pure experience to think; it’s perfect heavy rock, perfect doomy metal, and I want to live in that haunting smoke forever without a thought. That’s a sign of a masterpiece. What’s wild is this is nowhere close to their first. They simply have never missed.
Honorable Mention
Avrak – “Unborn”
After all these years of sonic experiments, it wouldn’t have been unfair to assume that maybe the members of Darkthrone weren’t interesting in black metal anymore. After all, their discography now is an encyclopedia exploring all of the hallowed halls of the genre, from prog to doom to thrash to trad metal to death and more. Avrak, a side-project of Nocturno Culto, open their career with a lead single that is simply perfect black metal. It has eerie atmosphere and blast beats that feel genuinely terrifying. It has a guitar riff drawn from the song “Black Sabbath,” the immortal title track of Black Sabbath’s debut that put metal on its evil course. The vocals and guitar are delivered with insane animal fever checked only by a kind of doom-laden stoicism. It’s imagistic, mythic, and retains that feral punky edge. How are they consistently this good?
Dreadnought – “Color of Our Broken Hearts”
Dreadnought have quietly assembled a brilliant discography, mixing progressive arrangements with a measured mix of melodic, extreme and more traditional heavy metal. “Color of Our Broken Hearts” is atmospheric in the proper way, possessing a hypnotic power that is best for deep thought or reading, like it not only wants to warm and surround you like a billowing cloud but also buffet your thought upward. It manages to capture a similar feeling as the more psychedelic end of work by Mastodon, feeling like you have been drawn into a wormhole with destination unknown, watching streaming color pass by you like threads of light. And it packs all of that into roughly four minutes.
Haywire – “Interstate Love Affair”
I’ve always liked punk. I grew up exactly halfway between Richmond, Virginia and Washington, D.C., which meant I was trapped in a nexus of punk and hardcore whether I wanted to be or not. That said, metal always felt more akin to my spirit, making punk feel often more like a beloved sibling than something always mine. Haywire tap into my absolute favorite punk band, Hüsker Dü, finding a fast way to my heart. The vocal delivery is rough and ragged, bellowed from the heart with an almost metallic grit. The music is delivered with fever rather than precision. The production lets noise in; I feel like I’m listening to a band and not a quantized demo. On top of all of this is an infectious perfect pop melody, just like classic ’70s punk was built on, and staggeringly beautiful vocal harmonies on the chorus. It’s a perfect song.
