It’s hard to tell if “Blind In One Eye,” from Coliseum’s upcoming House With A Curse album, is the band’s attempt at being intentionally divisive.
It’s hard to tell if “Blind In One Eye,” from Coliseum’s upcoming House With A Curse album, is the band’s attempt at being intentionally divisive. It bears little similarity to their earlier works, albums like Goddamage and No Salvation which were an amalgam of crust punk’s hammering speed and the down-tuned metal inclinations of bands like Kylesa and Baroness. “Blind In One Eye,” however, takes a different approach. First off, the song is noticeably slower than many previous efforts and singer Ryan Patterson trades his well-worn howl for a more melodic, if no less raspy, vocal style. Combined with songwriting that harkens back to the deranged blues rock of the criminally underrated Laughin’ Hyenas, what Coliseum offers on this song is a sort of apocalyptic bar rock which takes the rock and roll cliches – from the world-weary raggedness to the tambourines – and spits them back out with a sort of doomed fatalism that is only slightly undercut by the music’s drive. “There ain’t no hope left in this world,” Patterson declares towards the song’s end, and a listener could be forgiven for thinking that he means it. But Coliseum turns the negativity into such a big singalong that the nihilism is kept in check. This sense of resignation may alienate fans of the defiant attitude the band had utilized to great effect on previous albums, just as the more accessible sound might do the same for fans of their harsher material, but any fan of music as bleak as it is catchy will find a substantial amount to latch onto here.
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