The Formative Years – Eyehategod
There are few records like Eyehategod’s “Take As Needed For Pain” where I fall in love with at first listen and the enjoyment just keeps growing with each revisit.
Eyehategod is a category onto itself with its agonizing brand of dirty, downtrodden sludge that conveys authentically the convulsive throes of addiction, suffering and everything miserable.
Despite neither the instrumentation nor the subject matter being remotely near uplifting, Eyehategod conveys a hypnotically fierce intensity that feels empowering.
Heavily inspired by Black Sabbath-esque dizzying riffing and fuzzy amplifier worship, it is the blues and Southern rock informed melody lines courtesy of Crowbar’s Jimmy Bower paired with the unpredictable assaulting drumming, inextricably linked with distortion and feedback galore that makes Eyehategod unique and the powerful backdrop against which Mike Williams’ painful laments and vitriolic tirades are projected.
The album feels like it was cast in one piece and while it might not be particularly appealing for those in search for musical diversity, it is a rich, bleak and squalid testament to acidic, internal scar tissue from a resilient and enduring band that always seems to be coming back from something.A caustic and filthy ode to misanthropy.
