Photo courtesy of Pro-Music
Stoner rock stallwarts Clutch return to the road next month, giving fans another chance to congregate and bark along to frontman Neil Fallon’s madman sermons of robot overlords, government cover-ups and long dead civilizations.
Fallon’s bon mots, turns of phrase and sidewalk preacher screeds have carved a unique space for Clutch in the heavy music landscape. And the man who gave us lines like “shadow of the New Praetorian / tipping cows in fields Elysian” and “life inside the biosphere, dodecahedron fever’s here / sporting scarlet letters of genetic imperfection, dear” is once again in blissfully twisted form on Strange Cousins from the West, giving us a paranoid pastiche of assassins, drifters, backwoods monsters and chemical weapons. But how are these sinister visions born?
The band’s ninth studio album is the result of a freewheeling but tight four-week recording session with producer J. Robbins (”You can beat something to death until you’re deaf to it. The songs that are written really quickly are the best,” Fallon explains) and dozens of lyrical seeds jotted in notebooks, on scrap paper, and on any available surface. Fallon says he then fleshes out those notes during time he sets aside specifically for writing, either early in the morning or late at night. “I try to build a story around those phrases,” Fallon says. “Music evokes a mood, and you can crystalize that mood with words.”
And in fleshing out the mood of Strange Cousins from the West, Fallon found inspiration in modern horror author Thomas Ligotti, 15th Century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, true crime stories, historical landmarks and at least one dare. Here, Fallon reveals the birth of some of the more esoteric turns of phrase on Strange Cousins…...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily