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Song debut: Glorior Belli - "Blackpowder Roars"

Glorior Belli‘s last album, The Great Southern Darkness, was an intriguing mess. The band’s signature mixture of blues rock and black metal sounded like nothing else I’ve ever heard, but often became muddled — the blue and the black wrestled too tightly for control of the sound. Glorior Belli’s new record, Gators Rumble, Chaos Unfurls, has no such problem. The blues have won, and Glorior Belli has produced better and more interesting music as a result.

Case in point—”Blackpowder Roars,” the opening track on Gators Rumble, starts off in swing time with a big, rubbery baseline and pentatonic blues guitar arpeggios vamping away. No blastbeats, no tremolo. Every instrument is doing its own thing while remaining distinctly audible—praise be to Baron La Croix. By the time Julien, Glorior Belli’s chief songwriter and vocalist, comes in with his layered black-and-clean vocals, wailing on his Les Paul, the tone is set. The black powder doesn’t roar until just before the song’s end, and by that time, things sound way more Kyuss than Khold. That’s a good thing in my book. “Blackpowder Roars” reads as the thesis statement for all of Gators Rumble, Chaos Unfurls. Groove circumvents cliché, fun factor trumps seriousness, and heads must bang.

Gators Rumble, Chaos Unfurls comes out on October 29 via Agonia Records; preorder it here. You can check out another song from the album — the decidedly more blackened “I Asked For Wine, He Gave Me Blood” — here.

— Joseph Schafer