Album review: Saviours – Accelerated Living

So I’m reading the press release for the new Saviours album, and right there in the first few lines it tells me that “the sludge of previous efforts is all but vanished”. And I’m all, like, “man, that sucks – the best thing about Saviours was the muddy black gloopiness of it, like the musical equivalent of that tarry stuff that collects at the bottom of the bong water when you don’t clean it after a few heavy sessions”. A non-sludgy Saviours? That’s gotta be like crunchy nut cornflakes without the nuts and honey, AMIRITE?

Turns out I needn’t have stressed too much; the new Saviours album Accelerated Living is still grimy as all hell, like your sister’s knees after she’s been crawling across the carpark of some quasi-legal biker bar in search of her missing contact lens. Saviours are still keeping the focus on thrashy riffola, and while the production is much less bleary than before, it’s still distinctly uneasy listening, full of the garage-y malice of speed-addled late eighties thrash bands reviving the Sabbath aesthetic at a million miles per hour – you’ve got your abrasive palm-muted chords scraping away alongside the demon-driven drumming, yelled youthful Kilminster vocals digging up the D&D, drugs and demonology subject matter of a double-dozen schlocky straight-to-VHS horror flicks, and all the guitar heroism you could ask for – up to and including Lizzy-like harmonised lead hooks, whammy-bar dive-bombs and string-snapping solos of every flavour and velocity. Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it all before in all its sullen glory, but that’s the whole point – you listen to Saviours to save yourself the effort of listening to a hundred average albums just to find fifty minutes of genuinely awesome material. They’re an aggregator of style, see; like a condensed best-bits boil-down of the history balls-to-the-wall shred metal.

That’s a good thing, by the way – or at least it is in this household, as I expect it will be for pretty much anyone who grew up listening to fifth-generation C-90 clones of early Slayer and Exodus albums. The production has a clarity the eighties bands would have given their pointy headstocks for (you can actually hear the kick drum… or even feel it, if you’ve got it cranked up loud enough to annoy the neighbours), but Accelerated Living has a refreshingly warts-and-all sound, devoid of MTV gloss and glamour, giving the impression of Saviours having recorded the tunes in the old-fashioned way – by cramming the band into a room, turning everything up until the valves glow brightly and belting out the tracks as a whole band. Sure, I expect there was some tracking, some overdubs, some drop-ins and splices… nothing wrong with getting things right, after all. But the difference is listening to a band on record and knowing that, should you get the chance to find out, they’ll sound almost exactly the same on stage – a sonic authenticity that is sadly lacking in so much commercial rock product in this day and age, don’t ya know.

So, yeah – hang the tarpaulin over the windows, turn on the blacklights and lava lamps, and rip the arms of your denim jacket while your best buddy rolls a joint as long as his leg. Saviours are back, baby, and your headbangin’ neck ain’t gonna know what hit it. Sweet.