Rotting in the Belly of the Whale by Evil Blizzard
Release date: November 3, 2023Label: Crackedankles
Lancashire’s masked, dark post punk, psychedelic, bass truck loaded noise-niks Evil Blizzard, are back! It has been a five year wait for the follow up to The Worst Show On Earth, but do not fear (or should that read: do fear) as they return sounding not only full of vigour, but brimming with a hefty wider screen expansiveness. Stretching their sound out to incorporate all corners of their influences – Stooges, P.I.L., Killing Joke, Hawkwind, krautrock, 70’s dub – while distinctively being themselves is still intact.
The first half of the album is the band reaffirming their return with bangers, which will fit seamlessly into their live set for mosh-pit fire starters. The crunchy heavy ‘All You Bad, Bad People’, ‘Professional Driver’, and the raging 57 seconds punk blast of ‘Tiny People’ will all sound a riot live. The latter allows a speedy David Lynch admiring imagination to run wild for creating their own dream/nightmare sequence, “We dance in a small club, its full of small people with tiny feet”. While ‘All Pigs With Snouts in the Trough’ reimagines the Three Little Piggies nursery rhyme into their distorted orbit.
The album was recorded between February and April 2023 at the Rock Hard Studios in Blackpool but the uncertainty and strangeness of the years prior is reflected here. The second half of the album expands their dark horizons outwards into wider psych possibilities. ‘Lullaby’s’ initial dream opening transcends into a heavy thumper of a beat while hefty sonic lurches swing back and forth between subtle swirly effects
If you have seen the Blizzard live you know how fun and surreal it can get. The atmosphere edges towards darker and very heavy psychedelia on ‘Darkness’ where they initially dial back the heaviness with horror film soundtrack textures before unleashing a sonic outburst of glorious noisy mayhem, which they are experts at formulating, before it diverts off again to another dimension with a superb overriding melody. It’s the album’s slow burning gem, which clocks in at over the ten minutes mark and one can only hope they shove this onto their live set.
The week of Halloween is a fitting release time for the Blizzard to return. Spending time with Rotting in the Belly of the Whale reaps rewards and could turn out be their best album to date. As they powerfully remind us on the closing thoughtful dense chug ‘The Buried Believers’, “Be thankful for what you’ve got”. Indeed.
