Album review: Stinking Lizaveta – Sacrifice & Bliss

Sometimes doing this job is a grind; CD after CD of the same tired flavour-of-the-moment product, pushed out hot while there’s a chance the kids will still swallow it. But in between the dross are the gems, the bands and records that remind you why you started doing this in the first place. Exhibit A: Sacrifice & Bliss by Stinking Lizaveta.

What or whom Lizaveta may be (and why she (or it) is stinking) remains obscure – much like the band themselves, despite a fifteen year career. But obscurity is no assurance of quality in and of itself; for that, you need some idiosyncrasy. And hey, whaddaya know – Sacrifice & Bliss positively burgeons with idiosyncrasies; it’s ten tracks of doomish and sludgy rock and roll filtered through… well, something that was used in a bathtub chemistry set during the sixties, probably. Your guess is as good as mine.

But don’t pay attention to me – let your ears do the hard work. Stinking Lizaveta make a big sprawling prog-metal noise for a three piece, with sparse yet powerful drumming and the fluid drones of an electric upright bass propping up the guitar wizardry of Yanni Papodopoulos, which manages to take on rhythm, lead and vocal duties, sometimes seemingly all at once. Well, I say ‘vocals’, but there aren’t any words as such. The closest you’ll get to lyrics is Yanni whooping into his guitar’s pickups every once in a while like like a redneck at a NASCAR pileup. Yeah, I know, it looks ridiculous on paper. Sounds great on record, though, and even better live.

Sacrifice & Bliss is a kind of shoplifter’s grab-bag of tropes and hooks from the last forty years of rock and metal, gravitating (at least in tone) toward the lighter end of the post-metal/sludge spectrum, but borrowing gleefully from whatever catches Stinking Lizaveta‘s magpie eyes and marrying the resulting explorations to song titles that could have been mailed out by Robert Anton Wilson in his last weeks before the Illuminati finally silenced him. For example, “Zeitgeist, the Movie” mashes up a lost Helmet riff with trippy squelching wah-wah fun, flakes out in the middle to double-tracked tremolo’d feedback solo for about half a minute and then leaps back up and into business with a mad fretwank finale. Then you have “When I Love You”, the Stinking Lizaveta version of a ballad, initially coming on like a doom band doing an Eagles cover before the Wizard of Oz digs out his axe again and wrangles some howling soul out of the ever-willing blues scale.

Title track “Sacrifice & Bliss” sounds like it’s just going to meander aimlessly before the drums thump their way in under the queasy hungover chords and bass; it’s a soundtrack to waking up on the wrong side of the Mexican border with a pocket full of broken memories and a tongue that tastes like a sunbaked running shoe, before throwing your leg over your battered motorbike and heading for the nearest town to do it all again. “We Will See” is a scratchy and irascible Kyuss interrupted in the midst of reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test; “Superluxation” has shades of the Middle East in its scraping brittle chops and lead lines, and “Trouble Mountain” is as gloomy and menacing as its title suggests, while still powered by the effusive sense of “hey, we can cram another riff in here!” that permeates Stinking Lizaveta‘s music. It’s simultaneously very serious metal and very playful rock’n'roll.

Truth be told, the Stinking Lizaveta live experience is better than the record, but not by much. And as they’ll probably not be touring Europe again for a little while (unless we get lucky with a few festival dates), Sacrifice & Bliss should both tide you over and convince you to pre-book a ticket as soon as you see one. You may not know it yet, but deep inside you’re sick of modern metal; Stinking Lizaveta have the cure.