Something is in the water. Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2025 opus Tom’s Crossing follows two teenagers who steal a pair of horses and ride into the fictional Isatch mountain range of Utah. Boyhood, David Keenan’s latest novel, features a scene in which four purloined horses are fed acid and raced through the midnight streets of Glasgow. And a third act of equine larceny now takes place during the unholy Melvins/Napalm Death alliance – Savage Imperial Death March.
Setting off at a gallop, with King Buzzo ripping stoner rock ‘n’ roll riffs left, right and centre, ‘Stealing Horses’ is all denim and leather, hurtling for the horizon with eyes glancing over their shoulders as harmonies of rock’s favourite vowel ascend majestically.
Reuniting their 2016 tour line-up, Barney Greenway, John Cooke and Shane Embury of marauding blast beat progenitors Napalm Death join Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover from Seattle sludge merchants Melvins for this truly collaborative record which, in hindsight, reads a little like the set up for a scatological joke.
And there is something a little bit daft about this album. Starting amid a classic Melvins palm-muted chug erratically stabbed with feedback harmonics, ‘Some Kind of Antichrist’ treats us to Osborne announcing the phrase “Kicked in the balls” in his over-the-top falsetto. An innately funny grunted echo of the same line from Greenway swiftly follows. It’s good to hear that 40 years in the game hasn’t jaded their urge for silliness.
That point is reinforced during album opener ‘Tossing Coins into the Fountain of Fuck’. Bucking against the rhythm section’s belligerent maelstrom, a wriggling, writhing guitar lick switches registers and cuts into a wailing solo as all the fucks south of the sun are yelled at the heavens. And the soloing doesn’t stop there. Even amongst the doom grumble of finale ‘Death Hour’, the supergroup whip out a little high-neck guitar action. This penchant for fretboard theatrics might be a nod to American hard rockers Van Halen, who not only supposedly served as Dimebag Darrel’s final words but also feature here with the fading chords of ‘Jump’ winding the album down.
The sludge-grind combo don’t get too comfortable, however, with each track quickly dispersing into something else. ‘Comparison is the Thief of Joy’ sounds like a gutsy printer churning away, reducing its angelic vocals and Fantômas stomp to mechanical whirring. The aforementioned ‘Some Kind of Antichrist’ dissolves into sputtering noises with garbled vocals like a robot priest on the fritz whilst Crover plays solitary drums in a distant warehouse and, similarly, the spoken utterances of ‘Awful Handwriting’ glitch and distort beyond comprehension.
It’s all entertaining enough without breaking too much of a sweat. Savage Imperial Death March heaves along at a leisurely mid-pace, neither going for Scum’s smash and grab approach nor sitting with the riffs for the protracted period of something like Lysol. In this political climate, with that album title, this does feel a little like the horses have been led to a suitable source of H20 but have resisted taking a sip.
