The latest album from Black Tusk has all the swampy, sludgy goodness listeners have come to expect, and if you don’t know the backstory, you might not know that it’s overshadowed by tragedy. After a string of splits and EPs, Black Tusk were hard at work on their first full-length in five years, the follow-up to 2011’s roiling Set the Dial. One November evening, the bassist and vocalist Jonathan Athon decided to take a break from recording and take his Harley through the cypress-lined streets of his native Savannah with his girlfriend Emily.
A driver ran through a stop sign and into his motorcycle, critically injuring both riders. While Emily recovered, Athon incurred irreparable brain damage, requiring an induced coma. You can't take positives from a tragic situation like this, but Athon died upholding the ideals that made the sludge metal band he co-founded so great: careful risk-taking, hometown pride, unconditional (if unconventional) love, and most importantly, a bullheaded devotion to living life as if it could end in an instant.
When a key member of an active band dies, the entire venture incurs trauma, often accompanied by creative moratoriums and existential crises. This is especially true for Black Tusk, a trio of lifelong friends who have distributed the musical weight equally and distinctly among themselves from the get-go: guitarist Andrew Fidler and drummer James May are the scathing screamer and middle-range complement, respectively, to Athon’s mucky growls, and their tripartite howls instantly set them apart from their peers. It would have been understandable if they'd followed the lead of their idols Motörhead and laid down their instruments, to have resigned out of respect. But Athon’s tracks were completed before his death, enabling his bandmates to finish the record and tour behind it (Corey Barhorst, of Niche and Kylesa, will take Athon’s place on the road). Pillars of Ash, then, should be considered Black Tusk’s latest album first, tribute second: this is not a somber funeral, but a joyous wake, not to mention the band’s strongest album yet.
Pillars of Ash doesn’t alter the formula of the past two albums, but rather accentuates them with doubled-up aggression; slip on a pair of headphones for the album’s 35-minute duration, and your ears’ll be ringing for an equally long period of time. With a fellow sludge-punk—Toxic Holocaust frontman Joel Grind—behind the boards, Black Tusk’s sound is in the hands of a talented technical wizard, and his mix ramps up the volume without obscuring the churning melodic backend, or the high-low contrasts of Fidler and Athon’s vocals, which take center stage on tracks like "God’s on Vacation" and "Still Not Well."
Of course, source material is everything, and Black Tusk’s refusal to repeat themselves makes for a dynamic, diverse listen: a welcome respite from the paint-by-numbers paradigms that often dominate the modern inclination of the "swamp metal" the group helped pioneer alongside fellow Savannah natives Kylesa and Baroness. Despite the after-the-fact uneasiness of "Walk Among the Sky"—a barnstormer that reimagines death as a chance to take a transcendent stroll, rather than a six-feet-under slumber—the track sprints circles around the reaper, its rapid-fire key-changes and frequent, furious digressions never letting up. At the same time, "Desolation of Endless Times" and "Punkout" honor the group’s punkish roots, making ample use of Fidler's yelps and Athon and May’s pogoing percussion.
The band may toss an occasional nod to Slayer ("Born of Strife") and Motörhead ("Bleed on Your Knees"), but there's no cribbing of influences here. Rather, Black Tusk's combination of sludge, rock, hardcore, and death metal remains fluid, fertile, and most importantly, full of life, in spite of the tragedy that threatens to define it. Far from funereal, Pillars of Ash has plenty of love for good ol' heavy-metal melodies: "Black Tide" packs in all the sugary stomp we’ve come to expect from Torche, while the Athon-dominated "Desolation of Endless Times" (particularly its intro) could soundtrack an MMA highlight reel. With Athon’s passing, this LP may mark the end of the Black Tusk we fell in love with—but it’s the highlight of the band’s catalog, and the best tribute they could have imagined. There’s no telling what the future will hold for Fidler, May, and Barhorst as they soldier on without their friend and anchor, but judging from the sound of Pillars of Ash, their spirits are far from crushed. And Athon’s? Well, he’ll live forever, with every press of the play button.
