Cult bands are a curious phenomenon that contradicts the general rule that identifies access to the mainstream,or at least in the continuous militancy in the imagination of enthusiastsessential elements to be remembered in the huge amount of music produced and published in the last thirty years. To obtain the cult band label, it may be necessary to have the recognition of other artists, often of great success with the public or critics (or both). It happens that the Melvins have become cult because they are loved by Kurt Cobain. Other times, the cult develops because the formation in question stubbornly persists in presiding over an aesthetic niche, regardless of what is happening around and often in open contrast with market trends: the extreme noise of Merzbowthe mutant ultra-rock'n'roll of the Boris and the limitless punk of GG Allin are three very heterogeneous examples of how one can become an idol of a group of faithful listeners, ready to spread music that would otherwise be lost in the great sea digital discographies (or analog, for those who still have one).
Even rarer is the case of a cult band which has few albums to its credit and a style that is particularly recognizable because it is heterogeneous, unpredictable, difficult to describe. A band that, like the one we are going to tell you about, did not have much of a following among its contemporaries and that, when it could have tried to reach a wider audience, abruptly cut its career short, in this specific case due to a tragic bereavement.
With only two albums to their credit, no significant commercial recognition and the total indifference of the most transversal audience, not even through a successful artist, Acid Bath have earned their place in the hearts of those who conceive metal as a starting point for building music that is sometimes ferocious and other times lugubrious, sometimes frenetic and other times lyrical. Coiners of an unstable mix of stoner, doom, sludge, death and gothic metal, also injected with blues, folk, psychedelia and grunge, they have survived the test of time and even today their songs meet the needs of those looking for a different sound, between violence, dark humor and eclecticism.
The Clown's Laugh: The Beginnings and the Debut Album
Born in 1991 in Louisiana, more precisely south of New Orleans, Acid Bath is a synthesis of two other bands: Dark Karnival formed by Audie Pitre, Sammy “Pierre” Duet and Tommy Viator; Golgotha, formed by Dax Riggs, Mike Sanchez, Jimmy Kyle and Jerry “Boon” Businell, with the role of bassist entrusted to various different musicians. Pitre will become the bassist of Acid Bath, who will also do without Tommy Viator on drums, replaced by Jimmy Kyle and reinstated with a minor role on keyboards at the end of the band's (brief) career. For a short period of time Joseph J. Fontenot took over on bass.
After publishing the demo Hymns Of The Needle Freak (1993) ours are ready to debut with When The Kite String Pops (1994), presented with a cover featuring a disturbing clown drawn by serial killer John Wayne Gacy, infamously known as the Killer Clown and the perpetrator of at least 33 minors' murders. It is only the first manifestation of the band's taste for the macabre, the first taste of a caustic and violent irony that characterizes their production.
In almost seventy minutes and 14 tracks, Acid Bath disorient the listener by alternating devastating assaults and melodic openings, portentous accelerations and funereal slowdowns, brutalities gore and psychedelic visions. Singer Dax Riggs (with the backing vocals of the others) shifts from bluesy wails to schizophrenic death-metal roars from the opening “The Blue”, with the compressed and distorted guitars of Mike Sanchez and Sammy “Pierre” Duet helping to drive the constant changes in speed, intensity and atmosphere alongside Jimmy Kyle's restless drums and Audie Pitre's bass.
The sound flow of the following “Tranquilized” starts from a bluesy stoner-metal played at deafening volumes and closes in an epic slow-motion solo combined with a melancholic vocal melody. The poisonous sludge-metal of the short “Cheap Vodka”, with vocals filtered to the limits of industrial-metal, melts before the finale in a pool of psychedelic hard-blues.
I blew my last five on a cheap fifth of vodka
Gonna kill somethin'
There ain't nothing gonna stop us tonight
But the band also leans towards gothic in “Finger Paintings Of The Insane” and towards a more direct and brutal death-metal with “Jezebel”. In “Scream Of The Butterfly” it draws on crepuscular songwriting, marked by decadent lyrics and a creeping tension due above all to the contrast between the acoustic guitars and the metal drums, complete with double bass drum.
There's blood on the moon as we plan our escape
The goddess in bloom
Handcuffed and raped
There's blood in the bathtub baby
The King Murdered
There's blood on the moon
There's blood on just about everything
The haunting doom-death-metal of “Dr. Seuss Is Dead” shattered by a blaze grindcore which is pure sonic terrorism and characterized by a crescendo ending anticipates the angry and unstable “Dope Fiend”, a dying man's lament but also a grunge played by a death-metal band.
Added to the elements already encountered are the tribal percussions of the finale of “Toubabo Koomi”, the sample disturbing and even a rap verse in “God Machine”, the scream worthy of Tom Araya in “The Morticians Flame”, also alternated by growl monstrous while in the foreground the voice is much more melodic.
“Cassie Eats Cockroaches” closes with lyrics of a violence and brutality worthy of the Cannibal Corpsethe sonic equivalent of one of snuff film (including necrophilic drift).
The album sold a few tens of thousands of copies, even without the support of a real promotion: the production was entrusted to Spike Cassidy of DRI and the album was included in the catalogue of the small Rotten.
A more drinkable version of some songs from the debut album also reaches the broadcasters, in the form of the short Radio Edits 1 (1994): it's a bizarre attempt considering the uncompromising and difficult to classify proposal of Acid Bath.
Terrorism and Paganism: The Second Album and the Death of Audie Pitre
The second and final album will arrive in 1996 and brings listeners a reduction of the death-metal component to favor the more gothic, decadent, psychedelic and melodic aspects. The mix remains highly unstable, throughout the eleven tracks in the tracklist (to which is added a hidden track recited). If the debut, despite its great creativity, exceeded a bit in terms of duration, here the music only apparently totals 73 minutes due to the presence of the final hidden track: the actual duration, excluding the silence, drops below a total hour.
Paegan Terrorism Tactics (1996) does not back down from the provocation, starting from the title. If the stoner-sludge of “Paegan Love Song” is their definitive version of the deafening, bluesy and psychedelic song at the same time, also thanks to the work on the voices and the visionary and disturbing lyrics, the real novelty is that the band now also manages to write an acid blues-grunge song like “Bleed Me An Ocean”, obviously undermined by death-metal retches and nightmarish voices, and the even more lyrical and emotional “Graveflower”, a funeral ballad with a galactic solo of heartbreaking doom-metal, gothic chimes, a riff ghostly that sounds like a music box from beyond the grave.
The ghost of a pale girl is solemnly following me
Pale will she follow me into the sea
I feel the flowers screaming
To consume you
Like murder
The demonic blues of “Diäb Soulé”, with a swinging which contrasts with the ferocious screams and suggests a macabre dance, and the dark ritual that hosts the second part of “Locust Spawning”, closed by the blood-curdling and obsessively repeated cry “Devour!”, lead to the hallucinatory sermon of “Old Skin”, a short recitation for filtered voice that prepares for the melancholic and emotional peak of the album: “New Death Sensation” is a folk-blues threnody slowly transformed into a gothic and psychedelic ballad in triple time, made particularly disturbing by the filtered and otherworldly voices, the lugubrious chimes, the text similar to the poetic delirium of a suicide in the terminal stage of depression.
I wonder have you ever seen the sky
And felt this weight upon open eyes
New death sensation
Flesh flowers dream to bloom
Illumination
New death sensation
We dance the stone death naked by the shore
I hear her highway song forevermore
Illumination
New death sensation
This tomb is empty
The more robust “Venus Blue” does not change much the mood suffering, but translating it into a murky grunge with a bridge gut-wrenching one step away from industrial-death-metal.
To compensate for the ballads, there are still the slaughters. sludge death metal of “13 Fingers” and “New Corpse”, which are particularly notable from a drumming point of view. The folk-blues is strangely homogeneous in “Dead Girl”, poignant but far too verbose in its seven-plus minutes. To conclude the album, and unfortunately the discography, a decadent and disturbing poem, “The Beautiful Downgrade”:
Fingered slowly like the first time you came
The agents of oblivion descend upon the sane
Caked with mud and mother's blood
Playing death games in the rain
And we wonder how it feels to be free
I thought I heard them whisper mutiny
Living room rape scenes
We cut their throats while they slept
Dreaming and digesting shards of turtle shell
The television's blaring
And the ghost of Hitler speaks
Crowned with barbed-wire
I smear my warm semеn on the walls of my oppression
I accuse God for the murder of eternity
My everything that is nothing
Christian propaganda and dog sperm
Degeneration…
The beautiful downgrade
Do you remember the first sunrise?
Sharpened bone clenched tight in your fist
Screaming into the blue
An urge to kill the sky
I can smell the forest like pussy in heat
Barefoot I run through the chaos
The assassins of freedom tend the burning of truth
As we walk these prison walls
It's maddening, always touching something
On January 23, 1997, Audie Pitre died in a car accident, along with both his parents, while his brother Kelly survived. Despite rumors, Acid Bath never released their third album. Dax Riggs and Mike Sanchez would form Agents Of Oblivion, which lasted for one album. Riggs is also active with Deadboy & The Elephantmen as well as a solo artist. The other members have had minor stints in other bands. Demos: 1993–1996 (2005) completes the discography by collecting otherwise very rare songs.
At the time of writing, Acid Bath are approaching 300,000 monthly listeners on Spotify: a group of pagan cultists who started out with just two albums, over thirty years ago.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM