Black Orchid offers passionate but poorly recorded sound
William Dixon - May 1st, 2008Black Orchid is a local, four-piece metal outfit characterized by harsh vocals, detuned guitars and primal beats. With influences ranging from Lamb of God to the Deftones, the group’s aggressive live show often prompts audience members to flail about in a whirl of moshing and run-your-friends-over circle pits.
The band consists of Matt Babcock (vocals/bass), Ryan Smith (guitar/drums), Steven Haigh (guitar) and Ryan Buckley (drums). Together, the quartet has played around the Flagstaff area, including shows at Studio 111 and the Museum Club.
Black Orchid’s self-titled, self-recorded release features 11 tracks with varying degrees of recording quality. The album starts with a sound clip from the Terry Gilliam film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The end of the clip has Johnny Depp’s character proclaiming “anything worth doing is worth doing right.” This is an almost ironic statement, given the context of the somewhat erratically recorded Black Orchid. The guitar tones on some tracks are small and lack presence, while the snare drum often gets lost in the mix. The rough, guttural vocals are perhaps the one cleanly recorded part throughout the album, as the levels of the actual singing vocals often dip too low.
Despite the unpolished acoustics, Black Orchid still manages to come across as an aggressive piece of work. “Perception” starts with a mosh-worthy gallop which descends into a driving two-step rhythm. The clean guitar strumming in “Sins of Tomorrow” gives way to an up-tempo groove with fast drums and skate-punk-style guitar riffing. As with the other tracks, Babcock’s shouts give the song an added dimension of brutality. “No More” features a sludgy, dark feel that crosses between Black Sabbath and late-‘90s Korn-esque nu-metal. The intro to “Brothel” is a fast, stomping number well-suited for a circle pit. Melodic guitar lines sandwiched in the middle of the song are a welcome change to the rhythmic chugging of much of the guitar work on Black Orchid.
Perhaps the most musically engaging track on the album, the instrumental “Intro,” features spacey, clean-toned electric guitar set against a melancholy guitar ostinato.
Babcock sounds like ex-Sepultura and Soulfly vocalist Max Cavalera on tracks like “Perception” and “Brothel.” Lyrically, Babcock takes a stance for spirituality and against people and institutions that hold him down. Babcock pleas the listener to take a spiritual path on “Government”: “We must not follow/we must not lead/free your mind/find spirituality.” Babcock also finds time to derail his detractors in “Conform” when he screams “I don’t wanna be like you and/I don’t wanna quit when I’m through and/I just wanna spit on you.” Although Babcock’s screams are gruff, his lyrics manage to come through relatively clearly.
Black Orchid contains all the pitfalls of a self-recorded album: mismatched instrument levels, poor mixing and buried parts. Beneath the rough sonic façade lies a telling insight of a band that hasn’t quite hit the big-time, but nonetheless pours passion into what they do. Black Orchid is a raw, honest outpouring of metal aggression, tempered with strains of melody and a primal feel.