Absolutes are dangerous. The rhetorical logic of “all or nothing” is a violent assault on the beautiful heterogeneity of the world. Taking any position to its extreme endpoint risks gross oversimplification and infantilizing generalization. That being said, if your heavy metal is too fancy, it is bad and wrong and so are you.
No, I don’t actually believe that. I can be a fancy boy, and I’m as guilty of being wowed and distracted by novelty as anyone. But sister, when I listen to Sanhedrin, it feels inescapably true that your fancy heavy metal is bad and wrong. If it’s not exactly country music’s “three chords and the truth,” Sanhedrin’s heavy metal is still like looking each and every one of your daily struggles and hurts dead in the eye and saying, “I will keep going.”
On album number four, New York City’s Sanhedrin does exactly what they did on albums one, two, and three, which is to spin out a world-class set of no-frills, power-trio heavy metal. This is metal without prefix, qualifier, or adornment: riff and hook, thump and wallop, chapter and verse. Sanhedrin exudes a wonderful grit throughout the album, a winning combination of world-weariness and absolute determination that comes through in Erica Stoltz’s powerfully rough voice, in Jeremy Sosville’s fluid, memorable riffs, and in Nathan Honor’s unhurried shuffle on the drums. (Stoltz’s bass is mostly a timekeeping anchor, but occasionally it flits out into a roiling, rumbling throb.)
As a power trio with no extraneous instrumentation, Sanhedrin can only rely on their compositional strengths to provide contrast and texture. A key example of this is “High Threshold for Pain,” which brings in its first verse with an ominous, mostly guitar-less churn before opening out into a punchy bruiser. In the back half, though, the band dips into an atmospheric bridge where Sosville pulls out a straightforward but beautifully narrative guitar solo while Honor’s drums both keep pace and co-solo alongside him. When album opener “Blind Wolf” gets up to cooking, it’s both a stomp and a flex, and Stoltz and Sosville lay out some really nice overlapping vocals.
As on their previous albums, one of Sanhedrin’s great strengths is that even when they leaven the heavy metal thunder with slower, more mournful songs, the listener never feels like they’re being served up a treacly ballad. On the title track, the epic “King of Tides,” and especially album closer “When the Will Becomes a Chain,” they dial down the tempo but also seem to dig their heels in harder. Despite their skill at these darker-hued epics, Sanhedrin knows when to crack some heads and kick up some dust, like on the speedy, hell-raising brawler “Franklin County Line,” which whips by a little bit like Thin Lizzy by way of Motorhead.
Here’s a little test about heavy metal: how do you feel when you imagine yourself hollering along to a song’s mostly nonsensical lyrics? On album closer “When the Will Becomes a Chain,” the chorus includes these glorious headscratchers:
Swallow the sword / from hilt to blade.
Pride is a whore / when the will becomes a chain.
Walk out the door / give into the flame.
Pride is a whore / when the will becomes the chain.
I have no earthly idea what that means, but I feel immeasurably powerful when I shout it along with Sanhedrin – in the car, in the shower, cooking dinner, on a mountaintop, driving a riff-powered airbrushed t-top Thunderbird across the rainbow bridge.
First impressions can do a lot of work. The first time I listened to Heat Lightning, I had just returned to cold, snowy Chicago after a week in the Florida sun. The neighborhood was quiet and the sky was a pale, cloudless blue. I pushed and heaved at the accumulated snow with my shovel, scraping and hacking the packed-down treads of ice that the car had already made on the driveway. But with Sanhedrin in my ears and in my head, I had the strength and resilience to relish the physical labor of it. It’s not fancy, but goddamnit, it’s heavy metal.
