ALL ACCESS: Orange Goblin

CD Review: Orange Goblin – Healing Through Fire
Candlelight Records
All Access Rating: A

Orange Goblin -Healing Through Fire 2014

Time hasn't diminished the medicinal powers of Orange Goblin's 2007 album Healing Through Fire.

Slightly crispy and fuzzy around the edges, its bluesy, motoring riffage doused in gasoline and lit on fire, Healing Through Fire is a blazing stoner-metal arson for the great unwashed that never got a proper promotional tour Stateside – something singer Ben Ward has always regretted.

Their only Sanctuary Records release, Healing Through Fire was the band's sixth LP. Falling into obscurity, as Orange Goblin went on hiatus until 2011, it became a rare find recently for Goblin obsessives. Reissued by Candlelight Records with rampaging, greasy live renditions of the album's most infectious tracks, the muscular, writhing "The Ballad of Solomon Eagle" and the rugged, down-tuned harbinger of chugging evil "They Come Back," Healing Through Fire deserved a better fate, especially considering how dramatically it relives the suffering, grave fear and reeking death of The Great Plague and London's Great Fire of 1666.

Evocative and captivating lyrically, the words delivered with Ward's bestial vocal roar, Healing Through Fire is a furnace of an album, managing to sound wide and heavy on a hot and nasty "Hot Knives and Open Sores" and the brawny, seismic "Vagrant Stomp," while never succumbing to sluggishness. Even the punishing doom-metal pounding of "Cities of Frost," this swinging sledgehammer smashed repeatedly into a brick wall, is delivered with rage-filled intensity, and the relentless groove-mongering of "The Ale House Braves" circles with dangerous intent before charging into the breach without hesitation.

In spirit, Orange Goblin could be the hell-spawned bastard child of Motorhead, but on the smoldering "Beginner's Guide to Suicide," with its slide guitar, smoggy organ and pained harmonica, they play dirty blues with the devilish charm of Cream – rumbling, demented and psychedelic. Although Joe Hoare's guitar leads throughout Healing Through Fire are sharp and searing, just as his riffs are meaty and brutal, it's his expressive soloing on "Beginner's Guide to Suicide" that steals the show.

Until Orange Goblin's next studio full-length, which is apparently under construction, this violent revisiting of one of the band's surefire classics should mollify the pitchfork-wielding villagers waiting for more from these shaggy metal bikers. Let the Healing ... begin.
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Orange Goblin – A Eulogy for the Fans – Orange Goblin Live 2012

Candlelight Records

All Access Review: A

Orange Goblin - A Eulogy for
the Fans - Orange Goblin Live 2012

If the Hell’s Angels ever need a house band, they could do worse than Orange Goblin. These beer drinkers and hell raisers from Britain emit a gnarly heavy-metal roar as loud and smoky as the dirty exhaust pipes of an old chopper. And in all probability, like their brothers in denim and leather, they haven’t showered in months.

Or at least they probably hadn’t by the time they played Bloodstock and Hellfest in 2012, while out on the road supporting their late 2011 album, A Eulogy for the Damned. Welcomed with open arms by the great unwashed, the record knifed its way into the U.K. Top 200 upon its release and motored all the way up to No. 38 on the Billboard Heat Seeker’s chart. Taking no prisoners, A Eulogy for the Damned also conquered CMJ’s Loud Rock album listings by eventually grabbing the top spot. Still, as devastating and sonically brutal as A Eulogy for the Damned was, Orange Goblin’s studio LPs have never quite replicated the manly musk and hairy, brawling energy of the Orange Goblin live experience.

New from Candlelight Records, A Eulogy for the Fans – Orange Goblin Live 2012, comprised of thrilling performance recordings from both of those festivals of mayhem with videos and documentaries packed into a lively DVD, fills that void and then some. From the first squeal of feedback, Orange Goblin and their grizzly bear of a lead vocalist in Ben Ward set out to pillage and plunder, with churning, furious riffage born of ‘70s proto-metal and a healthy respect for doom rock, thrash and heavy, psychedelic blues that comes alive in the raging maelstroms of “Red Tide Rising,” “Quincy the Pigboy” and “Scorpionica.”

Relentless and punishing, Orange Goblin – established in 1995 – skillfully and dementedly handle twisting, crushing shifts in binge-and-purge dynamics with teeth-gnashing glee, sending the recent single “The Filthy & the Few” speeding into oblivion, bulldozing their way through “Acid Trial,” and then mauling “The Ballad of Solomon Eagle” and “Some You Win, Some You Lose” in beastly fashion. Whether he’s beating a meaty, menacing riff to death or flying straight into the sun on unpredictably wild solos, guitarist Joe Hoare maneuvers his way through the carnage like some crazed motocross rider. Hoare tears the guts out of the zombie-movie tribute “They Come Back” and the sprawling, Black Sabbath-like horror of “The Fog,” as Ward, Orange Goblin’s Rasputin of a singer, treats chilling lyrics in a gruff and malevolent manner that puts the fear of God into anybody who hears it. And that rhythm section, heaving to and fro while seeming so certain of its direction and drive, doesn’t shy away from a good bashing either.

There’s a little bit of cowboy in Orange Goblin, as the psychotic, mesmerizing grind of the irrepressible “Round up the Horses” so aptly illustrates, and this live effort comes off like a never-ending bull ride that tosses its audience around like rag dolls. Summoning the ugly power and raw, massive muscle of originators like Blue Cheer, Mountain and Vanilla Fudge, Orange Goblin claws through the tattered Southern rock glory of “Time Travelling Blues” and the rest of this set list violently, sending the frenzied crowd into paroxysms of metal madness. Those who were there are probably still talking about as one of the best nights of their lives.

- – Peter Lindblad