It would appear noise rock, the grimy old brute, is having a bit of a moment. With The Jesus Lizard’s return and Chat Pile’s imminent new album being merely the most high profile examples the timing could hardly be more propitious for a new God Bullies record. Happily As Above, So Below delivers, picking up from the late 90s but still sounding vital and current, thundering blasts of thick and gnarly guitars back up front man Mike Hard’s fire and brimstone weirdness.
Among the loud and ugly wave of early 90s US bands on Amphetamine Reptile, God Bullies were the first one I liked. A lot of those AmRep guys seemed to be sweating and straining to squeeze 70s hard rock into dense chunks of punk but the Bullies were a little bit garage, and obviously possessed of a twisted wit. They were more aligned with Cows, the label’s acid carnival of the absurd. Their last album, Kill The King, came out in ’94 on Alternative Tentacles and a couple of years later they called it quits.
Hard went on to front a series of bands with similar moves and often the same members (Thrall, TheyNeverSleep, Brain Saw) and in 2010 God Bullies got back together for AmRep’s 25th birthday and toured. You can watch that show online and it is a half hour well spent I promise you. The reformation didn’t last, for the various reasons bands don’t. More recently Thrall got up and running again playing sets of Thrall and God Bullies material, eventually deciding to revive the God Bullies name for this new album. It’s fair to say not everyone loves the idea but what you get is a record that kinda sounds like a mix of God Bullies and Thrall and I for one am not complaining about that.
‘I Am Mighty’ comes out swingin’, the riffs fat and heavy, Hard already fired up and freaked out. They recorded at Electrical Audio so it has that live feel and everything sounds great, rich and full, clear but not too clean. If you’re one of the people who found Rack a bit too shiny and separated this has more of that ‘loud band in a room’ muscle and grit to it. With their older records being made on low budgets in lesser studios it might be the best they’ve ever sounded.
They match that big sound to a strong and punchy batch of songs. ‘You Call This Love’ is a stand out, snare shots driving them at their frenzied agitated best while ‘You Never Know’ takes a surprisingly goth turn with circling guitar lines and Hard’s vocals recalling Andrew Eldritch. In familiar Bullies style ‘As Above, So Below’ opens with a preacher sample, before bringing a mean and intensifying grind as Hard sets in to his favoured topics, twisting religious and political deceptions. ‘Lies (WWG1WGA)’ shimmies right along the line, happily giving the middle finger to QAnon while borrowing their slogan for a catchy chorus. These sorts of ideas have always been Hard’s targets but even at his wildest he probably couldn’t have imagined the fevered insanity of their ‘Trump’s secret war on Satan-worshipping establishment will bring a day of reckoning’ conspiracy.
No wonder there are songs called ‘Save Me’ and ‘Help’. QAnon may have faded a little but conspiracy theories still present an existential threat. Writing about this kind of stuff coming out of the Reagan era, before the internet took hold, it’s depressing to see how Hard’s subjects are not only still current but have actually got worse. The wide eyed paranoia builds towards the end of the record. While the warning to watch out for ‘Cops In Plain Clothes’ seems simple enough his use of characters and shifting positions can leave room for misinterpretation. So just in case ‘We Are The Enemy’ is confusing, ‘Fight The Fascist’ is clear and direct about its opposition to the old nemeses “religious extremists, white supremacists” and a determination to “never stop fighting, never give up”.
