DRUG HONKEY: “GHOST IN THE FIRE”

(photo by Burton Rast)

Surly, don’t-fuck-with-me poses are a dime a dozen when a metal band holds still for a promo shoot. I’m pretty sure that in Drug Honkey’s case, this is no pose. And if you think these dudes look like badasses, their expressions are downright friendly compared to the music on their latest album, Ghost In the Fire.

This album is the fourth for them and the first for me, so I won’t be comparing it to their previous work. That would be pointless anyway, since diehard fans of the band have undoubtedly worn out their earholes with the music by now (Ghost was released in May) and have drawn their own comparisons. Instead, this very tardy review is for people like me in my pre-Ghost state — people who haven’t yet exposed themselves to what Drug Honkey do.

And what they do is manufacture atmosphere — blasted, burned, and black. They suck all the air out of the room and fill the void with a psychoactive fog that’s the stuff of nightmares.

They make the sound of a gutted city whose lifeless buildings are crumbling, imploding, and burning like giant waste bins beneath the bridges of catastrophe. It’s the noise of giant earth movers digging mass graves. It’s the soundtrack to the sun burning out and the planet freezing in utter darkness. It’s a recording of demons convulsed in the throes of insanity.

Like a heavy fog, the music moves slowly; for most of the album’s length, the pacing is at the cadence of funeral doom. Leaving aside the final two tracks, which I’ll come to eventually, the songs are built on truly massive foundations — huge, distorted bass chords that come down like methodical mallet blows while radiating black, suffocating energy; and ponderous drum and cymbal strikes that boom and smash.

Yet there are few open spaces between the cataclysmic beats of Drug Honkey’s hypnotic rhythms, and despite the titanic death/doom weight of the music’s low end, the songs are profoundly destabilizing.

Torrents of electronic noise and sludgy guitar and bass reverb fill many of those spaces. The electronically altered guitar parts also create hallucinatory vibes of varying kinds. They screech and writhe, they rake like steel claws coming down a blackboard, they skitter around the fringes like crazed poltergeists, they vibrate like reactor cores in the middle of a meltdown, they moan and warble and grind. Sometimes, they even create melodies — bleak, doomed, and otherworldly.

But notwithstanding the dense, morbid layers of instrumentation and the quasi-experimental use of programmed electronica, what really makes Ghost In the Fire a seriously disturbing experience are the vocals.

If you’ve seen William Friedkin’s 1973 movie The Exorcist, chances are you’ll remember most vividly the moments in the movie when demons speak powerfully and horrendously through the mouth of Regan MacNeil, a grotesque double- and triple-voiced sound that seems genuinely inhuman. That’s the first thing I thought of as I heard Paul “Honkey Head” Gillis work his vocal black magic on this album.

The vocal sounds are often dramatically altered and distorted through the use of electronic effects. They range from harsh howls, to wretched screams, to amplified death rattles, to guttural gurgles, to deep bestial roars, to the moaning, gibbering, grunting noises in “Five Years Up”. And they’re often layered in a way that evokes that Exorcist image , conveying the unspoken proclamation that “we are Legion”.

Even the chanted clean vocals that appear in “Dead Days (Heroin III)” (a song that appears to complete a trilogy begun with “Heroin” on Hail Satan (2005) and continued with “China Black (Heroin II)” on Death Dub (2008)) sound certifiably insane.

In the last two tracks on the album, Drug Honkey loosen the chokehold in an interesting reprieve before the end. “Twitcher” is a cover of a song originally released in 1997 by Scorn, the electronic music project of Mick Harris (ex-Napalm Death). Compared to the songs that precede it, the music is more up-tempo. It’s instrumental only, with a massive-sounding bass taking the lead and an almost jazzy snare beat on the drums as principal accompaniment. Skittering electronic noise shrouds the rhythms, turning the song into a psychedelic trip-hop workout, but with a disturbing aura that links it to the rest of the album.

The final song, “Saturate/Annihilate”, is also more up-tempo than the bulk of Ghost, with a blackened industrialized feel in the repeating beats. The vocals are still horrifying, yet there’s something infectious about hearing those distorted howls repeating the song’s sole lyrics, over and over again, “Bet your life / Move your life”. It’s the song on Ghost that’s most likely to survive in your mind as it recovers from 51 minutes of annihilation.

The last line in the interior of the striking 8-page booklet, all red and black, that comes with the Ghost CD reads as follows: “The only drug you need is Drug Honkey.” That may be a bit hyperbolic, but not by much. Listening to Ghost In the Fire is a nightmarish hallucinatory experience, one that captures the imagining of damnation about as well as anything you’ll hear this year.

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Ghost In the Fire features a guest appearance on guitar and vocals by Blake “Scag Honkey” Judd (Nachtmystium) on “Weight of the World”. The album can be ordered on CD and downloaded via Drug Honkey’s Bandcamp page here. You can find the band on Facebook via this link.

Here’s some of the music:

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