Supergroups: Sometimes you get Cream, and sometimes you get a bunch of people who spontaneously engage in a slapdash recording session that may or may not involve absurd conceptual pseudo-alter-egos. One of the end results of the Black Lips' possibly kicked-outta-India incident back in January, aside from a deluge of some of the most breathlessly manic press-release freakouts I've ever read, was an emergency stopover in Berlin to recuperate/decompress with King Khan and Mark "BBQ" Sultan. Apparently the mood was so charged and jubilant in the aftermath they celebrated by spending eight days recording an "evil gospel" album. Well... shit, why not?
It's important to keep this narrative in mind when listening to The Almighty Defenders, because it definitely sounds like it took no more than a week to exist from conception to completion, even if it's probably more likely that the group's actually a culmination of a more long-stewing collaborative interest. It's a hasty sounding album in pretty much every sense of the word, with spontaneous-sounding takes and muddy recording that sounds almost surreptitious. It's like listening in on a bunch of like-minded friends screwing around in a jam session, which it technically pretty much is.
The album contains 10 originals and a cover of the Mighty Hannibal's "I'm Coming Home", all of which fall pretty strongly in line with what you might expect from a Black Lips/King Khan & BBQ Show hybrid, only messier and more incoherent: lots of garage-soul wailing, drums that sound like they're being hit with a stake-driving hammer, snarling guitar riffs lathed into crude, shambling catchiness, and the occasional UHF station Horror Chiller Theater organ. Both bands' propensity to run the wider gamut of pre-psychedelic rock'n'roll is bolstered a bit by the gospel underpinnings, though many of the songs-- sludgy vintage rhythm & blues ("Bow Down and Die"), amped-up doo-wop ("Cone of Light"), goonish blues-rock ("Over the Horizon")-- don't need too far of a push to get there. It's a shame that the on-the-fly nature of this album dampens what could've been a superb collaboration given another month's worth of studio time, though there's moments where they manage to pull through anyways; leadoff track "All My Loving" isn't all that complicated, but it gets its hooks in you quick.
Now if only I could figure out what they're singing. The biggest downfall of The Almighty Defenders is that most of the vocals seem to be miked sloppily, so while you get a nice fuzzed-out quality to the call-and-response chants and the wild-assed choirboy choruses, the actual lyrics often get subsumed into this big swirl of noise. It's especially bad on "Cone of Light", where Mark Sultan's amazing deranged-Sam-Cooke voice, strong as it is, still winds up smothered under percussion. When the irreverent-gospel theme is decipherable, it can be pretty striking, if frequently a little too prone to self-aware, button-pushing edginess: "Jihad Blues" is a demented sweet-chariot-ride song that invokes exactly what you think it does ("just gimme a boxcutter and a one-way ticket"), and I'm banking on "The Ghost With the Most" being the first time in recorded history that the Holy Spirit is invoked using a catchphrase from the movie Beetlejuice. But maybe the spirit's more important than the letter anyways: there's two tracks in a row ("30 Second Air Blast" and "Death Cult Soup n' Salad") that are mostly just incoherent howling and mumbling and the occasional Three Stooges imitation, and they might be the most ecstatic moments on the album. Maybe the most profound, too.
