Greenmachine - D.A.M.N. (1998) (Full Album)

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• published: 02 Jun 2015
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Heavy metal reviewers and critics are ruining sludge metal by calling "sludge" every Johnny-come-lately heavy hard rock band that cribs from both Mastodon and Isis. Let's be honest, that shit isn't sludge, not in anyway, at least not the way sludge was for the first 15 years it was around; it was the ugliest, dirtiest, meanest music imaginable; the sound was culled from the "fuck you" antisocialism of Black Flag, the hopeless anti-music nihilism of The Melvins, the wicked earthy evil of Black Sabbath and the filthy swamp groove of Lyrnrd Skynrd. So it makes sense that most of the first sludgecore bands crawled out of the sewers of wasteland humidifiers like NOLA, NC and Miami, because you had to know the filth and slime first hand to put it into the music, but of course there were sludge bands in other places, even Japan, where Greenmachine hail from. Maybe Japan has massive swamps and sweltering summers where the sweat never evaporates, but I've never heard of them; as far as I know, almost the entire population of Japan lives in a few large cities. And that's what makes Greenmachine such a pleasant surprise. Good sludge requires a certain amount of earthiness to be, or at least seem, authentic, and this has it. As an album D.A.M.N. is coated in the same dirt that made Cavity's Human Abjection and Buzzov*en's To A Frown sludge masterpieces; it gives the music a thick, resinous quality, as if the master tapes had been dragged through the streets during a late summer heat wave and whatever stuck to it was put onto the disc. It's a great heavy sound, flipping a giant whiskey-bent finger to cleanliness and clarity and separation; the entire thing is drenched in guitar feedback and the clatter and ring of hard crash and ride hits; throw in some vocal-cord shredded screams and Greenmachine nailed the sound of sludge on D.A.M.N. But what about the songs, right? Well, even when sludge started there was always really two kinds; there was the more punkish bursts of Cavity and Buzzov*en and or the dirges of Grief. D.A.M.N. hews a little closer to the Cavity version of things, with most of the songs coming in shorter than three minutes, midtempo beatdowns that swing and stomp as much anything you've heard in the last ten years, but without the useless technicality and instrumental wankery that so many modern "sludge" bands use to hide the fact they can't write a good riff any better than they can write an actual song. Even with the punkish feel throughout, the longer tracks have a definite bluesy sound and some really heavy groovy sections that compare favorably with anything Bongzilla or Iron Monkey ever wrote. Of particular note is the long grinding "Narrow," a song that screams to be blasted at full volume through its entire 8 minute gut punching length; this track isn't musically that much different than "Anxiety Hangover," from EHG's Dopesick opus in that the tension builds and by the end of it, you're ready to beat the fuck outta anyone within hitting distance. Getting the songs right is important, but equally so is capturing the "feel" of a music that exists almost as much as an emotion as anything. Greenmachine, for the most part, does this pretty well too. This might not have the utter despair of hopeless addiction that plagues EHG's Dopesick, or the absolute hatred of the human race that is Grief's Miserably Ever After, or the abject insanity that is Iron Monkey's self-titled debut, but it does have a charm all it's own. The artwork throughout the album is either total genius or great marketing ploy, featuring: A woman with her head beaten in, on the cover; blood circling a dirty drain, on the back cover; a dirty toilet full of blood with floating cigarette butts, on the inside fold-out. Couple that with song titles like "Cunt Maniac," "Red Eye," and "Muddy," and even without printed lyrics (or even knowing if they sing in English, without one understandable vocal on the entire album) you get the idea these crazy fuckers aren't messing around. This is definitely worth tracking down if you like any of the aforementioned sludge bands, or if you want some heavy and mean and filthy metal. This might not be as good as the best albums in the genre, but for being three heshers from Japan, they do a damn good job of approximating great sludge. 1. On - 0:00 2. Muddy - 1:28 3. Red Eye - 4:26 4. Cunt Maniac - 6:08 5. Narrow - 8:32 6. Damn - 16:29 7. Flower - 22:40 8. Knowledge - 27:00 9. Underdone - 30:08