Summer 2020 is just not the time for a new Inter Arma album. During the last decade, the proudly complicated metal-etcetera quintet have made increasingly sophisticated, even confounding records, turning Odyssean tales into hour-long sagas. Their 2013 breakthrough, Sky Burial, was a brilliant manifesto from Richmond dudes who seemed to embrace Emperor, Skynyrd, and Pink Floyd in equal measure. But last year’s dauntless Sulphur English beat those icons into submission, shaping an inverted symphony of menacingly psychedelic doom and death metal. Listening to Inter Arma’s later albums is like running some labyrinthine gauntlet that may never end—and loving the feeling of finding out. But how many more tests of will do you need right now?
Instead, right on time, Inter Arma have returned with a welcome jolt of largely carefree relief—Garbers Days Revisited, a reverent and riotous collection of eight covers that’s playfully named for a polarizing Metallica landmark and their own fabled Richmond practice space. Inter Arma’s enthusiasm for a good cover is an enduring, endearing feature. They’ve taken on “Fortunate Son” and “Creeping Death” for the hometown crowd, done surprise sets of punk standards, and often teased “Hot for Teacher.” Their records, after all, are testaments to musical erudition, gyres of splintered genres made possible by ecumenical listening. For Garbers Days Revisited (and unlike Metallica), they steer clear of the relatively obscure or rather recent, cutting a wide path through familiar territory—from Ministry to Tom Petty, from Nine Inch Nails to, yes, Prince.
Most of these takes are pure fun, gleeful selections from a collective jukebox. Inter Arma bound through Cro-Mags’ anti-conformity anthem “Hard Times” as if reciting secular scripture memorized as wild kids, shouting out the chorus like they’re singing to the stereo. They prowl through Venom’s “In League with Satan” with devilish relish, using sinister effects to suggest they’re still trolling parents after all these years. “Runnin’ Down a Dream” scans as the allegiant work of the world’s best bar band.
Even when they’re reinventing a song, this mutual esprit is clear. Hüsker Dü’s “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” is surprisingly apt fodder for their black metal churn. They race through Grant Hart’s youthful ode to the tatterdemalion he loves, smearing the narrative details until only the adolescent exuberance remains. It’s the same guileless feeling that will make you wish the guitar heroics of “Purple Rain,” the record’s loving and lumbering finale, lasted forever—or at least as long as other Inter Arma albums.
The scale of Inter Arma’s music has often subsumed their lyrical ambitions, crowding out the tales of conquest, reckoning, fear, and forgiveness that have anchored their last two records. The cri de cœur of 2016’s Paradise Gallows was to overthrow “those men who wish to exalt themselves/as gods,” though you’d be excused for overlooking it amid the glorious commotion. These covers let them clear up any lingering questions. Their faithful take on Ministry’s “Scarecrow” fortifies the original with a belligerent swing endemic to Southern metal; the opener, it feels like walk-up music for fending off what Al Jourgensen decried as the “rotting corpse of inhumanity.” Their breathless race through “March of the Pigs” picks a similar fight—that is, how to survive a world content to use you for spare parts. (Bonus: Hearing a band as meticulous as Inter Arma approximate these abrupt changes is a stark reminder of how deeply disorienting the Nine Inch Nails hit remains.)
But nothing here is as powerful, convincing, or urgent as Inter Arma’s cover of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” a song released in 1970 after a feverish decade of civil rights struggles in the face of racist white obduracy. It begins as a country-rock ballad, all maudlin harmonies and strummed acoustics. That’s a feint for the doom and black metal surges that follow, with Mike Paparo screaming the lyrics over blast beats as if delivering Inter Arma’s final commandments.
Garbers Days Revisited transcends novelty status here, reconnecting not only to Inter Arma’s past but to our present. After Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd clashed over their respective regional diss tracks half a century ago, they played nice, becoming buddies who wore one other’s T-shirts and swapped demos. Inter Arma offer no such quarter. These are native Southern sons, railing against their kind with tragically current charges. As the cavalcade of Confederate statues in Inter Arma’s hometown come down, maybe “Southern change,” as Young put it so long ago, “is gonna come at last.” It would be wonderful to hear “Southern Man” someday as a relic and not, again, as contemporary rallying cry.
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Buy: Rough Trade
