Album review: Chickenhawk – [self-titled]

The anarchic thrashing of Chickenhawk is a welcome antidote to glossy pop-punk, but the band’s self-titled début falls short of true awesomeness on a few counts. But give it a moment to get going past the Add N to [X] synth bass and disco handclaps of “Dude-a-Tron”; that’s your false sense of something or other, right there.

Or maybe not, as the case may be. In a rare fit of accuracy, the little press release describes Chickenhawk as “a raging schizophrenic multi-personality disorder of an album”, and that feels pretty accurate after you’ve taken a forty-minute bronco ride on a hyperactive hybrid of spazzed-out stoner rock and rabid grindy thrash, peppered with fragmetary shards of subgenres as diverse as cod-country and mathcore.

Chickenhawk are unmistakably a guitar band, despite the reappearance of synth tones on a number of tracks – no cheesy string pads here, just maleficent buzzing bass tones and deep-buried odd bits. “Piglosaur” takes us to more familiar rawk territories; with sludgy scraping dis-chords and drumming that leaps from groove to technical rattles and back again in short order, dropping in little stops and gaps to keep you guessing what’s actually going on.

Soon we end up following Chickenhawk into slightly more traditional stoner territory, albeit recorded with a sparse production that implies a small concrete room with damp walls rather than a lonely desert canyon. There are some interesting twistings of the Sabbath riff formula with some tech-metal squealings from the lead guitar, and gradually the overall sound marches toward a wild-eyed fever of oddness at the close of the record.

Some tracks are better than others, though. The staccato timings of “The Let Down” are accentuated by the keys sneaking in under the guitars, but “NASA vs. ESA” is nowhere near is interesting as its name implies it should be, retreading the doomster clichés at a brisk pace without bringing anything new to the table – except what sounds like a shout-along backing chorus of be-heliumed Japanese cartoon characters. It does have a healthy blatter and thump, however, as does “Mandarin Gin”. Elsewhere, “My Name is Egg” comes across as how Faith No More might have sounded if they had formed as teenagers in 1998 or so; splashing cymbals over fast off-kilter riffs and twisty timings, and surrealist mantra-choruses giving way to shrieking howls.

Chickenhawk feels like an attempt to bring some prog sensibilities to the straight metal formula, and it’s pretty successful. I could see this ending up on Small Stone Records or a similar label, although – and I hate to keep going back to this – one would hope a better job of balancing the sounds would be done at the production stage. It’s a shame to hear decent tunes betrayed by duff mixing.

It’s not the most original album ever, but Chickenhawk are clearly trying to push the edges of the formula, and I can’t think of any British band that sounds quite like them. The one thing that is blindingly apparent is their passion, and that means I can forgive the production and the clichés somewhat – Chickenhawk sound like they’re having a lot of fun while still staying focussed on the music. As such, I’m willing to bet they’re a decent proposition live, and acolytes of the doom/thrash riff gospel will find quite a bit to smile about. But put a little bit more rocket science in the blend, and there’d be something to shout about from the rooftops.