Before there was metal, there was the blues. Metal's original trinity-- Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple-- all started in Britain's blues scene, and those roots are still discernible on their early records. Even into the 1980s, there were traces of the good-time boogie music of Jimmy Reed and Slim Harpo in hair metal, while darker strains of Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker lurked inside Glenn Danzig's outsized persona. It wasn't until the last 20 years, when thrash and black metal became the predominant influences on emerging bands, that bluesy metal took a turn toward the passé. Except in Sweden, that is, where long-haired and leather-lunged 70s rock fetishists like Graveyard are as plentiful as cheap, fashionable furniture.
Pitched as the midpoint between Sabbath-obsessed sludge merchants like Witchcraft and funkier, Free/Thin Lizzy-inspired outfits like Horisont, Graveyard don't stick to strict 12-bar formulas or indulge in the usual "I can't quit you baby" blues lyrical clichés. But the hellacious, Bon Scott-like screeching of Joakim Nilsson and the darkly danceable groove that unmistakably slithers through the band's third record, Lights Out, point to a tradition of American blues and European blues rock that's always been part of metal's family tree, no matter the latest fashion.
For contemporary metal fans, Lights Out might sound more like Wolfmother-- or a supercharged version of the Black Crowes-- than an actual metal record. It's true that Graveyard disregard nearly 40 years of the genre's history; Lights Out essentially picks up where Paranoid and Machine Head left off, and re-imagines a different path for metal that amps the intensity of the originators but keeps the Mississippi Delta-via-Birmingham vibe intact. Lights Out also shares the subtle political undercurrent of many of those early metal records, though the targets are vague enough to be as applicable to 2012 as to 1972. The furious "Goliath" includes references to "consumer wars" and "wolves at the door" over pile-driving drums and the dueling, endlessly soloing guitars of Nilsson and Jonathan Ramm. The anger is even more palpable on "An Industry of Murder", a death march that sounds like "Black Sabbath" played in double-time, where Nilsson finds common ground between 60s hippie-speak and OWS sloganeering, howling, "The unholy alliance, god and money seals the pact/ Old friends turn into enemies, when greed has set your path."
Graveyard already proved they could turn out catchy, scream-y blues-rock songs like Lights Out highlights "The Suits, the Law & the Uniforms" and the hyperkinetic "Seven Seven" on 2011's Hisingen Blues. Where Lights Out diverges is on the ballads. On these, Graveyard sound like a completely different band, particularly Nilsson, who softens his voice to a gentle coo on the slowly swelling, strings-heavy epic "Slow Motion Countdown". Only on "Hard Time Lovin'" does Graveyard slip into retro-rock shtick, with Nilsson singing frankly ridiculous lyrics about a hard-touring rock dude and his lady-- "And sure I've tasted fruit of many kind/ Once I got a piece of you there was no need for nothing else"-- over a foreboding, fuck-me lurch. Better is "Fool in the End", a moody exercise in sullen self-pity with a great stuttering riff that ends with a potent explosion of over-amped hostility.
Bands like Graveyard will always be susceptible to accusations of nostalgia, but Lights Out works because it feels like a genuine continuation of its source material, rather than some kind of corny, ersatz tribute. Traditions in metal, as in blues, act as signposts that must be respected, even when they're diverged from. No matter where you go, at some point you're obliged to eventually bring it all back home.
