Labels: Southern Lord
Review by: Alex Deller
Now here’s a tricky one. Ever since ol’ Dave Grohl embarked upon his lacklustre Foo Fighters endeavour I’ve remembered him banging on about Metal, as if somehow trying to validate the sacharine drivel the Foos were and still are churning out. Word of this “project’ bubbled around for a while, and at the time I thought it sounded fairly horrible, hopefully to be lost unto the sands of time like so many bad ideas. But here we are, and here is Probot, with two songs, one featuring Cronos and one with Wino as hired hands.
“Centuries of Sin’ is a mid-paced thrash blast from a time when “thrash’ meant long hair, white sneakers and blue jeans so tight you could lip-read Lars Ulrich’s cock. Opening with an insidious mid-paced riff and decking itself with Cronos’ rasping howl things progress much as you’d expect them to, with many a chug, some ridiculous lyrics about hobgoblins and flurries of speed that conjur the image of many a flailing head of hair each attached via scrawny neck to a patch-laden, sawn-off denim jacket. A reasonable affair.
My initial appraisal of the song on the flipside to which Wino lends his pipes and guitar heroics was that it was a twatload of shite. Maybe this was because it both begins and ends with a mediocre “cosmic’ feel, which, rather than aligning me with some superior galactical force makes me think of low-rent Dr. Who episodes and “Space Raiders’ corn snacks. Having managed to gloss over such things I was pleasantly surprised to find an enjoyable jostle that actually manages to rock and roll in a way that both the Obsessed and Spirit Caravan were/are capable of at the best of times. This means basic, heavy, no-frills rock music topped by Wino’s soulful baritone, a truly pleasing thing indeed.
So, this is a decent enough record then? Hmm. Yes and no. Yes in that the music is entertaining enough to keep me listening a couple of times over. No in that I can’t shake the idea that this is just another vehicle for David Grohl’s “zany’ sense of humour, an ironic ego massage like every stupid Foo Fighters video or nauseating guest appearance with that irksome shit Jack Black. Couple this with the fact that metal is officially “in’ for the foreseeable fifteen minutes, and that the Darkness are receiving plaudits from every shit-for-brains writer and DJ who ten years ago praised the likes of Nirvana for burying the same sorry style of music, and you have a very paranoid and suspicious individual at the end of these particular headphones.