No matter how much you try to stay enthusiastic and not jaded about things, if you manage to get to the point where you have the privilege of regularly writing album reviews for magazines, as I have fortunately had for a while now, there will come a time when you will inevitably look at your assigned list with a weary sigh. That happened to me when I saw the reviews I had for the next issue of Zero Tolerance this month, where a couple of the albums I’d have to slog through sounded… unexciting, to be nice about it. The cool thing about it is that sometimes you’ll also be pleasantly surprised, which is what happened right with my first spin of the new Blacklab album, the very appropriately titled ‘In A Bizarre Dream’. Let’s face it, the artwork isn’t a great feat in graphic design, and the description which included terms like “Sabbath inspired” and “doom witch duo” didn’t elicit much more anticipation than just another Desertfest-ish early-hour bill-filler stoner psych thing at best, which the world absolutely doesn’t need any more of.
A couple of details - all of this before the first listen, I have to stress again - did make me wonder, though. Duos, if you think about it, very rarely suck, as do bands comprised entirely of women, or bands hailing from Japan (from Osaka, to be precise) for that matter. None of these things are habitual in bands that just stick to a tired formula or that just go with the trends, so I was mildly curious when pressing play. I do admit that I didn’t know the band’s first two albums by then (I have repaired that fault since), so those creepy initial seconds of ‘Cold Rain’, followed by a soul-warming, slow and fuzzy riff were my introduction to Blacklab. One of my eyebrows probably rose slightly when the drums kick in at 0:43, because it suddenly becomes a very heavy thing, and the same eyebrow most likely arched up an inch more when Yuko Morino started growling exactly a minute later. At 2:27 she actually sings, while the whole massive groove just keeps plowing at you relentlessly, and by then I can say that I was already well hooked.
It’s an awesome track, and an awesome opener specifically, but still, so far, so Sabbath, right? The talent and the passion are very clear, but there still isn’t much to be completely blown away in terms of originality. ‘Abyss Woods’ then kicks in, a rocker, more dynamic affair, and this is when Blacklab, and the album, really start to take a hold of you. Yuko is a constant highlight, she is both the lullabying, slightly menacing fairy drawing you in and the cackling witch demon melting you into a pile of flesh and bones on the floor when you realise the fairy was leading you straight into hell. But the way her guitar and Chia Shiraishi’s drums interplay constantly, the dynamics of the riffs that just constantly blend into each other as you headbang your neck muscles away, is a thing of great wonder.
Both for the benefit of that review I had to write and for pure personal enjoyment, I procured both ‘Under The Strawberry Moon’ and ‘Abyss’, their previous albums from 2018 and 2020 respectively, and while I heartily recommend them to anyone who might be discovering the band just now too, I have to say that ‘In A Bizarre Dream’ is very clearly their high point so far, a tremendous step up in songwriting, intensity, heaviness and just plain and simple delirious creativity.
Structure, too. That second song gives way to the short and punchy ‘Dark Clouds’, a punked up rock out under three minutes that sounds like it could have well been a strange High On Fire outtake or a highlight on Boris’ ‘Pink’ (in fact, to give you a couple of country(wo)men references, imagine Boris’ heavier, less out-there-weird moments coupled with a nastier, sludgier Church Of Misery, and you’re not too far from this side of Blacklab shown in the first three songs of the record, at least), and then, after this three-track ramp-up, the album changes quite dramatically, though quite surprisingly it doesn’t upset its flow at all - the sign of a well thought out structure. An album isn’t just a pile of songs one after another, or at least it shouldn’t be. So then you’re thrown into a very dark pit with ‘Evil 1’, and then you find the only exit to the pit to be a hallucinatory journey through a long tunnel called, there you go, ‘Evil 2’. This second section of the album is somehow concluded by ‘Crows, Sparrows And Cats’, which features Lætitia Sadier herself. Yes, the very same Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab. One of the things I should have read straight away on the press release is the bit where Yuko says the band’s name itself is a combination of her two favourite bands - Black Sabbath and Stereolab. It’s an odd pairing, sure, but the unusual pairings are often the ones that lead to the most interesting results, and while calling Blacklab’s music a mix of those two is quite reductive, there are worse ways to describe some of the best moments on this album. Oh, that song has a video too, and it’s trippy and awkward and bizarre and fantastic, so watch it now:
The last stretch of the album is akin to that half-awake moment you have after a long bizarre dream, with two more dark-Stereolab kind of moments, a dreamy instrumental interlude before the massive closer ‘Collapse’ sort of captures everything the duo has attempted throughout the album in just one song, and it totally nails it. One last mention has to go to the sound itself - Jun Morino’s production and Wayne Adams’ (you know him, from Petbrick, Big Lad and the amazing Wasted Death which are somehow never mentioned) mixing job have resulted in the exact balance of grit, low end, clarity and fuzz for each different moment, and it helps every song hit you in a seemingly unique way.
Listen, I know you’re fed up with stoner and sludge and witches and the colour purple and wizards and whatever cliché pile these boring bands have been punishing us with for decades now. I know I am. But don’t let that stop you from checking out Blacklab. They’re a rancid breath of fresh air, and if that sounds like a contradiction, that’s because so does their music. A beautifully twisted, engaging, addictive contradiction.
You can find Blacklab on Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram and Encyclopaedia Metallum.