“Frank Owen Gorey is not a well person. Frank Lloyd Blight is not a well person either. Physical illness provided the genesis for their collaboration. Mental illness has kept it going…. Would it be too un-empathetic to say I hope the two Franks never get well? I’m only being honest about my greediness for their music. Wellness is overrated anyway, especially when it comes to death metal.”
Those were among the words I spewed in the context of premiering a song from Summer Camp Sex Party Massacre, an album by the two Franks under their chosen band name Blight House that Nefarious Industries released almost exactly five years ago.
Back then it seemed evident that these two had either shunned, or been shunned by, the outer world, preferring the confines of a swampy basement and whatever collection of mechanical and unspeakable organic materials they used in making their thoroughly demented and disgusting death metal. How delightful it must have been for them to see almost everyone else forced by the pandemic into a similar isolated existence!
Well, they must have taken some delight in that state of affairs, because now Blight House is returning with a thoroughly macabre new album. While others may be fumbling about looking for something to light the way out of all the dark tunnels in which we find ourselves, the two Franks have rediscovered how to Blight the Way — and you will learn how they’ve done this through our premiere stream of the new album that bears that name, in advance of its August 4 release by Syrup Moose.
Embarking on a track-by-track review is a risky endeavor. It risks tedium and ignores the prevalence of short attention spans and constantly wandering minds. But I decided to do it anyway, because I just couldn’t not share the track-by-track comments of Blight House themselves, just so you understand how thoroughly twisted their musical themes are. Of course, I couldn’t resist adding my own comments either. So, let’s begin….
…but let’s put the album stream here so you can listen while you read… and I’ll just give you just a brief high-level preview: This is insane.
“Dismembers Only”
Blight House: “The human body is like a bonsai tree, only revealing its true essence when its limbs are pruned with care.”
Me: For those who are clueless about what they’re getting themselves into, this provides an effective introduction. Like all the other songs, it’s compact. Like all the others, the vocals are the foul utterances of an ugly monster choking on viscera and bone splinters as it growls and gags. Like the others, the guitar tone is caked with grit, and the drums slug with a ruthless body-bruising punch. In its slower movements, the song is a ghastly, oppressive drag. At higher speed, it’s a violent romp. At middling speed the bass gets a chance to amble about in drunken glee.
“Cryptid Cutie”
Blight House: “Man vs Self. Man vs Man. Man vs Beast. Man meets Beast. Man falls in love with Beast. Man forgets Self. Man abandons Man. Man and Beast live happily and slippery ever after.”
Me: Here we have a lustful musical spasm, the bass manically bobbing, the guitar gleefully skittering and screeching, the drums chopping on the block. It’s a catchy little beast too!
“Florida Man Hails Satan”
Blight House: “The Sunshine State should change its name to The What The Fuck State. Every bad decision rises up from the swamp and threatens to drag us all down. Even the devil is thinking of moving up north. He’s crashing at our place while he figures things out.”
Me: Couldn’t agree more with the sentiments. And it’s entirely believable from this devilish escapade, which includes infernal laughter and piercing instrumental delirium, that Satan is indeed bunking in with the Franks, and seems to be having a hell of a good time.
“Too Ugly to Live, Too Dumb to Die”
Blight House: “Have you ever stayed awake for 48 hours, looked in a mirror, and stared into the black, empty, hopeless void that used to be your eyes? This is the theme song to that.”
Me: Excellent vocal sample to start this track, but hell, all of them on the album are damned good. This song turns out to be a nasty and nefarious piece of work, in which something like a weirdly wailing saxophone and vigorously jumping riffage cavort around a steady metronomic beat. Kind of jazzy, kind of psychedelic, kind of enthralling, definitely menacing.
“Moms Away II: Dad’s Bod”
Blight House: “Our Mothers’ Day song from Summer Camp Sex Party Massacre deserved a Fathers’ Day sequel. Now, you can properly celebrate dad bods on their special day. A patricidal sing-along for the whole family.”
Me: Blight House bring out the jackhammer for this one, but it bounces in ways that seem fiendishly happy. Gets the toes tapping, but the vocal cacophony is a bestiary.
“Bible-Belt Baby Buffet”
Blight House: “Babies are a delicious and sustainable way to manage world hunger and overpopulation. We prefer whole-baby slow-roasted over a sweet wood like apple or pecan, as is commonly served in America’s Bible-Belt. But you can still get good results at home with an Instant Pot and assorted baby parts.”
Me: Another head-mover and leg-shaker, primitive and primal in its romping groove and accented by a very cool warbling bass line in its midst. The macabre vocals channel-shift to make sure both halves of your brain get turned to mincemeat. Could I get a second helping, maybe something chubbier with a little more thigh meat?
“Death Will Not Be Enough”
Blight House: “This song is about every backwards thinking misogynist scumbag that wants to abuse women and what we’d do to them. If their attention span is too short to listen to the entire song, we have two simple words for them: Go die.”
Me: Plenty of fast-paced, head-hammering grindcore fury in this one, along with doses of brutish thuggery, guitars that discordantly scream and sear, and vocals that come off even more sewer-dwelling (either that or someone flushed a big toilet a couple times). As forecast, a lethal piece of work.
“Grassquatch”
Blight House: “Traditional cultures around the world have long known that some sasquatch are attracted to the smell of cannabis flower, and that one may summon a grassquatch through the simple rite of smoking. Today, as cannabis legalization spreads, many unwitting smokers are encountering grassquatch in the wild. If you accidentally summon one, experts recommend that you stay calm and pass it along.”
Me: Well, you can hear the grassquatch in this heavyweight spectacle, which alternately rumbles, staggers, pounds, and convulses. So high….
“Walpurgis Date-Night”
Blight House: “Against all good sense and reason, an incredible amount of people think vampires are sexy. Have they never made it to the last chapter of the book? The end of the movie? Of course, it’s only natural to be attracted to animated corpses. It’s the immortal ones that are problematic.”
Me: There’s something heavy and undulating at the bottom of this one, and lots of shrieking mayhem in the upper reaches, plus we get an appearance of something strangely inviting that resembles a clarinet or flute, and of course another vocal horror show. A head-spinning diversion similar to “Too Ugly To Live, Too Dub To Die.”
“Acephalophilia III: Hopelessly Headless for You”
Blight House: “Acephalophilia is a fetish for headless things. We’ve explored this concept since our first album. In this third installment, we address the fact that acephalophilia is not necrophilia. Because of this, the window of opportunity for acephalophiliac love-making is tragically short, but through this song we hope to show that true romance is nonetheless possible.”
Me: If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have noticed that every one of these songs throws in some kind of curveball you weren’t quite expecting, I mean other than things like the idea of sex with headless things. Here it’s woozy clean-sung falsetto vocals that normally wouldn’t be caught dead in a death-grinding barrage that resembles a merciless excavation machine plowing throw pavement while heavy-caliber munitions go off at red-hot speed.
Credits:
Blight the Way was recorded at Great Swamp, with Frank Lloyd Blight handling all vocals and Frank Owen Gorey handling all instruments and recording duties.
The duo were also joined by Ron Varod (Sabbath Assembly, Zvi), who provides additional lead guitar on “Too Ugly To Live, Too Dumb To Die,” and by Glumi UwUhamme, who provided additional vocals on that same song and on “Acephalophilia III”. They induced Mark Alan Miller to master the record at Sonelab, and Misha Mono to create the cover art and logo. The photos above were made by Doc Darkwood.
Blight The Way will be available on August 4th. As with all Syrup Moose releases, the physical release will have an accompanying Tarot card and cassette release.
PRE-ORDER:
https://blighthouse.bandcamp.com/album/blight-the-way
FOLLOW BLIGHT HOUSE (to hell):
https://www.facebook.com/blighthouse
https://blighthouse.bandcamp.com/