Evil Blizzard
The Worst Show on Earth

Release Date: 2018 | Tracklist

There are memorable pub gigs and then there’s going to watch Evil Blizzard. The joke with the band is they enjoy the abuse directed at them by the audience for being awful, so boos and heckling are actively encouraged. The genius is half the time the band are genuinely pretty bad, in particular, having four bass players does not lend itself to shitty venue sound systems and when you then mic up the drummer to sing…well, pretty soon you end up with the sound of an anguished man howling into a reverberating wind tunnel. The other side of the coin is that when they’re hot, this band are simply the most memorable live act you could hope to stumble upon; six or more freaks stalking the stage, all masked up and in full costume, some just dancing waving cleavers, others wielding bass guitars, all whipping up a crowd of similarly attired weirdos into a sweaty mess. When they broke into the monolithic ’Sacrifice’ from their last release, ‘Everybody Come to Church’, the level of intensity in the room was akin to a tribal ceremony; less a ‘cult band’ than an out and out cult.

So onto the music, ah yes, the music; how to describe the noise these four bass players and a singing drummer deliver？ Well, sometimes the Blizzard sound a bit like a super group made up of members of Hawkwind and The Fall; at other points it’s pure Ministry meets Killing Joke with Ozzy on the mic. The atmosphere they’re going for, as ever, is a dread so thick you can taste it balanced off nicely with a palpable sense of freakish mischief. Simple riffs and rhythms are the order of the day, not for simplicities sake, but because they’re danceable; the other bizarre thing about Evil Blizzard is they’re a party band at heart. Complexity comes into their compositions through a welcome psychedelic bent, and this is where ‘Worst Show’ progresses into new territories as the level of exploration and sonic layering have both increased; plus, well, they’ve just got better at incorporating this element. Slowly but surely they’re getting closer and closer to releasing an actual 'rock classic' of an album, and certainly ‘Worst Show’ is by far the closest they’ve come up to this point.

There’s a crispness to the sound here, with the production noticeably fuller and the (bass) guitar tones boasting more polish and sheen. In terms of song writing it’s business as usual for the first few songs; ‘Hello’ is all skipping drums and the repeated mantra that is the track’s title inviting the listener to come on down to silly town; ‘Fast Forward Rewind’ is another natty singalong which includes squidgy electronic FX and a vaguely gothic guitar figure that weaves in and out of proceedings; ‘Unleash the Misery’ is a livelier update on the last album’s queasy ‘Spread the Fear’ with lead singer Side delivering disconcerting nursery rhyme lyrics. From the end of track three the album breaks its chains and escapes into more experimental territory and this is where this release really proves its worth. Straight away ‘Like a God’ sets out its stall as a more lithe and elegant (yes, elegant!) version of ‘Sacrifice’ and this could’ve been labelled the band’s crowning glory in their recorded output so far, only it’s itself bettered by the very next track here, the irrepressible ‘Tell Me’. This buzz saw rocker tumbles out of the traps like a bastardised Motorhead/PiL hybrid and as much as we’re only in June it’s still easy to state this will end up one of the best rock songs of 2018.

Close behind in the quality stakes is ‘Pull God from the Sky’ which will surely take up the mantle of ‘ultimate epic’ in the band’s live set. A strange disembodied spoken word sample of a child remains audible throughout the first half of the song telling us ‘all the stories have been written, all the TV shows are re-runs...we need to pull God from the sky’ and suitably the track carries an ‘end of days’ sombre feel; well at least until the 6 minute mark at which point the band decide to pummel that sentiment into oblivion, before then it turn launching into a stunning final two and a half minutes as vocals reenter the fray. The title track set closer also clocks in at a mammoth ten minutes and is the band’s most experimental offering yet; a successful merging of a noise track with a post rock-ish instrumental which feels a fitting way to wrap up an album that goes a long way towards proving Evil Blizzard are far from the ‘one note joke’ it would be easy (and lazy) to label them as.

It’s time to retire the apologetic ‘well, they’re a great live band’ descriptor that even the band are perpetuating through calling this album 'The Worst Show on Earth’; this show sounds earth shattering through my home speakers guyz. Proper album this.

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