Review Summary: Death Well for Johnny
The more adventurous "Johnny..." album released in recent memory courtesy of Crippled Black Phoenix songwriter Justin Greaves, live bassist Matt Crawford and vocalist Belinda Kordic -- Discerning metal-pie post-slicers agree.
Tight at 40 minutes with an identifiable sound and flush bag of tricks 'You' offers something for everyone (reading this) through sheer breadth of ability rather than diluted commonality. A range broad enough to titillate and an ease that belies a greater depth of talent bursting to escape the confines of it's surfeit smattering. These experimental offshoots originating from CBP practice sowed a furtive creative yearning for something darker nastier and more immediate, reminiscent of Greaves' abrasive full-bore hostility drumming for early Iron Monkey.
Shepherded by the experienced maturity of Greaves' guitar cohere a signature styling across a polyphony of expressions producing a dimensionality of musical expeditions and emotional poles traversed. The ferocious GRIME and rapacious He Moves double-jab dazes, then steadily scales the doomy bluffs first felt underfoot in the opener towards a mount of delirious stupefaction. Here, the trampling bass of bison rumbles through furrows of heather under peals of thundering drums "Crossing" the face the post-metal plain. Longtime CBP fans will find this arid sonic mesa familiar and enjoy tracing the tactile contours of it's rippling front.
Elsewhere punk-adjacent 'pink' firecrackers punctuate the reverberating roar of fuzzed black-ice churning in sludgey bowels girding a sinewy progressive underbelly bellowing scabrous vocals. Kordic's venomous melancholy takes center stage to end the album 'Without You', croaking a treacly lament with a gothic twang described as 'necro' - fitting ode to a feline that was.
Unlikely to chart a definite heading anytime soon the only thing I'm sure not to expect is a sophomore slump. More than mere splenetic purging sublimated from the runoff of CBP austerity, Johnny The Boy have succeeded on all accounts in crafting an evocative, not wanderlust, but intrepid vitality through maelstroms of serrated riffing and bracing bone-snapping clarity, no small feat for your average side-project act.
