Blind Idiot God – Before Ever After (Indivisible)
Tracing their trajectory to a period of time thirty-odd years ago, an era in which the idea of intelligent heavy music was largely considered oxymoronic, Blind Idiot God managed to combine the leftfield power of Die Kreuzen and late Black Flag with the disorienting atonality of Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham, alongside a healthy dose of free jazz and dub reggae influence.
Blind Idiot God – Before Ever After (Indivisible)
Tracing their trajectory to a period of time thirty-odd years ago, an era in which the idea of intelligent heavy music was largely considered oxymoronic, Blind Idiot God managed to combine the leftfield power of Die Kreuzen and late Black Flag with the disorienting atonality of Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham, alongside a healthy dose of free jazz and dub reggae influence. Incongruous though the influences may seem, the band melded the elements from which they drew into a seamless whole, a concoction comprised of a series of tense yet expansive ebbs and flows which separated them from the vast majority of heavy music, even of the most adventurous sort.
Little surprise then that their following was considerably more limited than those artists who opted for a path of lesser resistance. But also unsurprising is their current reincarnation which finds them active again after an extended semi-hiatus (though the band has been actively performing for the past decade, they haven’t released an album since 1992’s Cyclotron), re-emerging amidst a wildly different musical landscape than that from which they originated – one far more accustomed to oddball eclecticism, one in which discordant instrumental sludge-dub is hardly the outlier it might once have been.
But ultimately the increased chance that more people might grasp what Blind Idiot God are doing, thanks to heavy music’s current zeitgest, would amount to little if the band lacked the ability to concoct music as well as they did in decades past. Thankfully, this isn’t the case. Opener “Twenty Four Hour Dawn” sets the pace with a dense, knotty tangle of chords that rapidly unfurls into a loose, exultant rush of sound. Lest a listener think the album’s totality will be comprised solely of this sort of open expansiveness, however, the following pieces veer back and forth between dubby spaciness, lurching noise rock tautness, and occasional forays into bouncy Zappa-isms. The extent to which any of these elements succeed in and of themselves will depend on a listener’s predilection for spry leaps across genre boundaries, but even the moments that tend to stand out most strongly (for better or worse) act as a destabilizing force preventing the album from settling into too single-minded a direction. While a less eclectic approach might have led to an album in which a listener could lose him or herself more easily, the direction taken ended up far more engaging.
Though the groundwork for the successes of Before Ever After was laid with the approach put forth on Blind Idiot God’s earlier releases, the album’s strengths rely heavily on two factors for success as a work that stands on its own. First, following a five-year hiatus starting in the mid-90s, the band has been active again for nearly a decade and a half prior to recording their newest album, honing a sense of interplay that makes itself readily apparent in the sharp zigs and zags that comprise the album. Second, Bill Laswell’s production work lends the proceedings a sense of warmth and space no matter how dense and harsh the music itself ends up (which should come as little surprise given Laswell’s resume – though he’s worked with everyone from Whitney Houston to Motorhead, his most noted work has involved no small amounts of spaciness, dub influences, and cross-cultural interminglings).
While it’s not unreasonable to approach with skepticism the emergence of some long-dormant cult band – fancy production and art from a popular cover designer in tow – Blind Idiot God prove that, though many of their trails had been blazed in years past, the time spent refining their approach was well-spent. Though their music may prove too cerebral, too sprawling, and too diverse in its pool of influences for the average listener, the band’s staunch devotion to a distinct aesthetic, one that eschews the obvious in favor of something more challenging and rewarding, renders their body of work indispensable and their newest album easily on par with anything they’ve released to date.
