Acid Bath - New sensations of death

The indefinable Louisiana cult band has combined decadent poetry and ferocious violence, aching refrains and eardrum-shattering explosions into an unstable, lugubrious and causticly ironic blend, with sludge and doom metal as its main points of reference

by Antonio Silvestri

Cult bands are a curious phenomenon, one that contradicts the general rule holding that access to the mainstream, or at least a continuous presence in the imagination of fans, is essential to being remembered amid the enormous mass of music produced and released over the last thirty years. To earn cult-band status, recognition from other artists can be key, often ones with considerable commercial or critical success (or both). That's how the Melvins became a cult band, thanks to the love of Kurt Cobain. Other times, a cult following develops because a band stubbornly persists in guarding an aesthetic niche, indifferent to what's happening around it and often in open conflict with market trends: the extreme noise of Merzbow, the mutant ultra-rock'n'roll of Boris and the boundless punk of GG Allin are three wildly different examples of how one can become an idol to a group of devoted listeners, ready to spread music otherwise destined to get lost in the mare magnum of digital discographies (or analog ones, for those who still have them).

Rarer still is the case of a cult band with only a few albums to its name and a style so distinctive precisely because it's heterogeneous, unpredictable, hard to pin down. A band that, like the one we're about to discuss, never had much of a following among its contemporaries, and that, just when it might have tried to reach a wider audience, abruptly cut its career short — in this specific case, due to a tragic loss.

With only two albums to their name, no significant commercial recognition, and the total indifference of the wider public — not even by way of some successful artist vouching for them — Acid Bath have earned their place in the hearts of those who see metal as a starting point for building music that is at times ferocious and at others lugubrious, at times frantic and at others lyrical. Architects of an unstable blend of stoner, doom, sludge, death and gothic metal, further laced 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, one steeped in violence, dark humour and eclecticism.

The clown's laugh: the beginnings and the debut album

Formed in 1991 in Louisiana, more precisely south of New Orleans, Acid Bath grew out of two other bands: Dark Karnival, formed by Audie Pitre, Sammy "Pierre" Duet and Tommy Viator; and Golgotha, formed by Dax Riggs, Mike Sanchez, Jimmy Kyle and Jerry "Boon" Businell, with the bassist's role filled by various different musicians over time. Pitre would go on to become Acid Bath's bassist, while the band also did without Tommy Viator on drums, who was replaced by Jimmy Kyle and later brought back in a lesser role on keyboards toward the end of the band's (brief) career. For a short time, Joseph J. Fontenot took over on bass.

After releasing the demo Hymns Of The Needle Freak (1993), the band was ready to make its debut with When The Kite String Pops (1994), fronted by a cover reproducing an unsettling clown drawn by serial killer John Wayne Gacy, infamously known as the Killer Clown and responsible for at least 33 murders of minors. It's only the first manifestation of the band's taste for the macabre, the first taste of the caustic, violent irony that characterizes their output.

Across nearly seventy minutes and 14 tracks, Acid Bath disorient the listener by alternating devastating assaults with melodic openings, tremendous accelerations with funereal slowdowns, gory brutality with psychedelic visions. Singer Dax Riggs (with backing vocals from the others) shifts from blues laments to death-metal roars in schizophrenic fashion right from the opening "The Blue", with Mike Sanchez and Sammy "Pierre" Duet's compressed, distorted guitars helping to drive the constant shifts in speed, intensity and atmosphere, alongside Jimmy Kyle's relentless drumming and Audie Pitre's bass.

The sonic flow of the following "Tranquilized" starts out as a blues-soaked stoner metal track played at deafening volume and closes with an epic slow-motion solo, paired with a melancholy vocal melody. The venomous sludge metal of the brief "Cheap Vodka", with vocals filtered to the edge of industrial metal, dissolves before the end into 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 veers toward the gothic on "Finger Paintings Of The Insane" and toward a more direct, brutal death metal with "Jezebel". On "Scream Of The Butterfly" they draw on twilight singer-songwriter territory, marked by a decadent lyric and a creeping tension, due above all to the contrast between acoustic guitars and metal drumming, 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

Murdered the king

There’s blood on the moon

There’s blood on just about everything

The harrowing doom-death metal of "Dr. Seuss Is Dead", broken up by a grindcore blast of pure sonic terrorism and marked by a crescendo finale, paves the way for the furious, unstable "Dope Fiend", a dying man's lament that's also grunge as played by a death-metal band.

Added to the elements already encountered are the tribal percussion of the closing section of "Toubabo Koomi", the disturbing samples and even a rap verse in "God Machine", a scream worthy of Tom Araya in "The Morticians Flame", alternated moreover with monstrous growls while up front the vocal is far more melodic.

"Cassie Eats Cockroaches" closes with lyrics of a violence and brutality worthy of Cannibal Corpse, the sonic equivalent of a snuff movie (necrophiliac undertones included).

The album sells a few tens of thousands of copies, even without the backing of real promotion: production duties go to D.R.I.'s Spike Cassidy, and the album comes out on the small Rotten label.

Radio stations also get a more palatable version of some of the debut's tracks, in the shape of the short Radio Edits 1 (1994): an odd attempt, given Acid Bath's uncompromising, hard-to-pigeonhole sound.

Terrorism and paganism: the second album and the death of Audie Pitre

The second and final album arrives in 1996, bringing listeners a reduced death-metal component in favor of more gothic, decadent, psychedelic and melodic elements. The mixture remains highly unstable nonetheless, across the eleven tracks on the record (plus a spoken-word hidden track). If the debut, for all its great creativity, ran a bit long, here the music only appears to total 73 minutes because of the hidden closing track: the actual running time, silence excluded, drops below the hour mark.

Paegan Terrorism Tactics (1996) doesn't back down from provocation, starting with the title. While the stoner-sludge of "Paegan Love Song" is their definitive take on the deafening track, blues and psychedelic at once, thanks partly to the vocal work and the visionary, unsettling lyrics, the real novelty is that the band now also manages to write an acid blues-grunge track like "Bleed Me An Ocean", undermined of course by death-metal convulsions and nightmarish vocals, and the even more lyrical and emotional "Graveflower", a funeral ballad with a galactic, aching doom-metal solo, gothic tolling bells, a spectral riff 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 swung rhythm that clashes with the ferocious screams and suggests a danse macabre, and the dark ritual that opens the second part of "Locust Spawning", closed by the chilling, obsessively repeated cry "Devour!", lead into the hallucinated sermon of "Old Skin", a brief spoken-word piece with filtered vocals that sets up the album's melancholic and emotional peak: "New Death Sensation" is a folk-blues dirge that slowly morphs into a gothic, psychedelic ballad in triple time, made particularly unsettling by the filtered, otherworldly vocals, the mournful tolling, and lyrics resembling the poetic delirium of a suicide at 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

Empty is this tomb

The sturdier "Venus Blue" doesn't change the suffering mood much, but translates it into a murky grunge with a gut-wrenching bridge a step away from industrial death-metal.

Offsetting the ballads are the sludge-death-metal slaughterhouses of "13 Fingers" and "New Corpse", which are also particularly remarkable from a drumming standpoint. The folk-blues is strangely homogeneous on "Dead Girl", aching but a bit too long-winded over its seven-plus minutes. Closing the album, and sadly the band's discography, is a decadent, 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 barbеd-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 of his parents, while his brother Kelly survived. Despite the rumors going around, Acid Bath would never release their third album. Dax Riggs and Mike Sanchez would go on to form Agents Of Oblivion, who lasted just one album. Riggs has also been active with Deadboy & The Elephantmen as well as a solo artist.

The other members went on to minor experiences in other projects. Demos: 1993–1996 (2005) rounds out the discography, collecting otherwise very rare tracks.

At the time this piece was written, Acid Bath are approaching 300,000 monthly listeners on Spotify: a congregation of pagan-cult devotees who started out with just two albums, over thirty years ago.

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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