Preamble: my daughter has eventually found out that I was letting my hair getting long as to be able to headbang with some kind of style and when she surprised me practicing in front of the bathroom mirror she sighed and got back to her room, waiting for the dinner call listening to Avril Lavigne. During our frozen chicken dinner, she asked me if I wanted to be a punk, so I took advantage of this rare father-daughter moment to explain her that I had been one in the seventies, before she was born. She was kind of proud at first and then embarrassed. She remained silent while I told her about the good old times and all these bands she had never heard of. When I finished cleaning the table, she told me I should not pick her at high school anymore because some of her friends had told her I looked liked a pervert in my Audi TT.

First, you must get over the pomposity of the title that might make you think that this is a black metal album. The 8 tracks format might have the same consequence, so as the length of some of the tracks (from 3:41mn to 13:36mn). But no, this is not a Norwegian black metal album. Charger comes from UK and is the second pleasurable surprise that we receive from Peaceville Records after Katatonia. Their music is some kind of mixture of stoner, punk, heavy metal and deconstruction. The major quality - and flaw- of the record is that it is an attempt at mixing different genres altogether, but they have not succeeded in the transitions inside the songs. So every song seems to run shakily from impressive heavy riffs to breakdowns and back. Anyway, every song delivers its angst-ridden strokes with an incredible garage sticky sound, a “full bodied aural carnage”.

‘Pennies for soil’ sounds as if Incubus had the balls to achieve something truly heavy and non-commercial. This song is the shortest and ‘simplest’ and then the most achieved. Longer songs like ‘Chide and harmonize’ or ‘God made us in the image of his ass’ sometimes make me think of Fantomas-Melvins heaviest tunes, less deconstructed of course but yet interesting in their odd structures. No singing around here, gutturals mostly or drowned in the music screams. I won’t say that the singing spoils the songs but it becomes more and more annoying to hear the same thing over and over again while the musical facet is so grippingly developed. I have been hypnotized by ‘A ventilation system for cooling poultry’ which is a intense passive-aggressive odyssey.

I think this CD will replace my Slipknot’s in my heavy music cleaning of the house Saturday mornings. 

-Angus "movie adaptation" Anderson

/apr 15th 2003/