Thursday, December 6, 2012

Album Review: The Chariot One Wing

The Chariot
One Wing
**** out of *****

There is a line in The Chariot's song "and" that screams "We make the song/Sound like what we want" and there is no better description of this whirling album.  

One Wing is designed as two sides, flowing all together yet broken up into tracks with the words "Forget Not Your First Love" for side one and "Speak in Tongues and Cheek" for the flip-side.  In those phrases you get everything from hymnal processions to thrashing metal, spoken poetry vocal shredding ballads to diabolical visions; One Wing throws every fucking thing at the listener.

From the opening slamming of "Forget" the listener is bombarded until frontman Josh Scogin gasps for breath allowing us to take it all in.  Rather then just random hammering and off kilter instruments the band has produced a well crafted full length release, finding mixes with metal that work.

"Not" contains traces of spoken word over stop/start guitar pounding while "Your" is a straight up hymn.  "First" is the most engaging song on the disk as it breaks midway into a spaghetti western cowboy gallop complete with trumpets.

"Love" blasts metal and chimes while "Speak" never does, it just screams over a simple piano ballad.  "In" is fascinating as it quotes The Beatles as "love is all you need" apparently in the spastic death throes of life, pretty accurate actually.  Both "sides" of the album end with drastic feedback but it is easy to see why "Cheek" closes the album with its powerful speech from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator powerful and cinematic, like One Wing as a whole.
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This is pretty cool, a disk that is hard to define in anyway, and a joy to listen to as you try.  Granted it isn't for everyone, but it is a great listen with complexity, power and passion.
Support the band here, buy the album here, catch them live (they are supposed to be insane) here, and you can actually peep the whole disk below:

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