Friday Full-Length: Orange Goblin, Coup de Grace
Released in 2002 on Rise Above Records and The Music Cartel (which at the time brought Rise Above‘s releases to the US market), Coup de Grace is the fourth album from London’s Orange Goblin. In some ways it was a departure, and in some ways an affirmation of the band they were becoming and would continue to become. Transitional? Yeah, but a standout too. If you only know their first couple records, or you only know their latter-day output — their latest LP, The Wolf Bites Back (review here), came out in 2018 — it might take a minute or two to understand where they’re coming from.
But, until they actually go ahead and just release an album of Motörhead covers, Coup de Grace is probably the closest they’ve come yet to doing so. Where their 1997 debut, Frequencies From Planet Ten (discussed here), and its 1998 follow-up, Time Travelling Blues (discussed here), had been pretty well dug into the then-formative idea of what stoner rock was, grown out of the band’s origins as Our Haunted Kingdom and inflected with doom accordingly, and 2000’s The Big Black (discussed here) began to expand upon in sound, drawing back on the fuzz and filling that space with a harder-edged burl that, over time, has become a defining element of Orange Goblin‘s craft. Coup de Grace would continue that stylistic movement while at the same time stripping down the approach to as raw as it’s ever gotten in their career.
Aided in their cause by producer Scott Reeder (Kyuss, The Obsessed, etc.), Nebula‘s Tom Davies and twice-appearing guest vocalist John Garcia (Kyuss, Slo Burn, Unida, Hermano, etc.) — who shows up on the ultra-hooky “Made of Rats” and the late “Jesus Beater” — guitarists Pete O’Malley and Joe Hoare, then-bassist Martyn Millard, drummer Christopher Turner and vocalist Ben Ward brought a new echelon of themselves to the work they did across Coup de Grace‘s 12 tracks and 51 minutes, from the right-on-fuck-yes heavy chug of “Rage of Angels” and the boozy brawl of “Monkey Panic” to the out and out punk rock of opener “Your World Will Hate This” and the Misfits cover “We Bite,” the ’70s heavy blues of “Stinkin’ o’ Gin” and the careening biker vibe in “Whiskey Leech” and the quintessentially-their-own cuts like “Getting High on the Bad Times” and “Born With Big Hands,” Orange Goblin‘s we’re-down-but-at-least-we’re-drunk point of view taking shape amid the fuzz-overdose of “Red Web” or “Made of Rats,” the hook of which is so straight-ahead it feels like the song is punching you in the face with it, which, yeah, it kind of is.
The acoustic-led instrumental “Graviton” notwithstanding, one thing Coup de Grace doesn’t really try to do is hypnotize. “Stinkin’ o’ Gin” is the longest cut at 7:21 and has its jam as it 
pushes deeper into the second half of the song, but even there, you know in hearing it that Orange Goblin are going to bring it back around to finish out, and they do, letting the album cap with a sample: “What the hell was that shit?” Nearly 20 years later, it’s a record that’s only continued to hold up, and it does so while finding a blend of heavy rock, punk, and doom that feels as organic as anything Orange Goblin have ever done to-date. At no point during Coup de Grace does it sound like the band sat down and said, “Okay, now we need a song that does this” — maybe they actually did, but it doesn’t matter because the finished product of the album doesn’t sound that way. It sounds like they were in the rehearsal space following riffs and this is where they led to.
And at some point you have to give mention to the production specifically, because Coup de Grace doesn’t sound like anything other Orange Goblin release, before or since. Yes, they absolutely built on what they did here with 2004’s Thieving From the House of God, but the charged aggression that began to show its head with The Big Black and seemed to come into focus here would inevitably continue to become a feature for them, on Thieving as well as 2007’s recently-reissued Healing Through Fire, pairing with the penchant for memorable songcraft that’s been a part of their identity since the first record but that really came forward starting with Time Travelling Blues as well. But the sound of Coup de Grace is distinct, and the balance it strikes on its own is perfectly suited to the material, allowing “Rage of Angels” or “Red Web” to be thick enough to get their point across but still be consistent with barroom throwdowns like “Getting High on the Bad Times,” or twisting speeds of “We Bite” and “Your World Will Hate This.”
Maybe this is the true record that’s not overthought. Maybe this is the one. It doesn’t by any means sound thrown together haphazardly — the sounds are sharp and you certainly wouldn’t call anything missing from the end result of the mix — but Coup de Grace feels almost live-tracked for the energy Orange Goblin put behind their delivery, and Reeder‘s recording job captures that in undeniable form. Maybe it did just happen that way. Wouldn’t that be something? Imagine that for a minute.
Orange Goblin‘s progression would continue, has continued, to evolve over nearly two decades, and each of their albums is a landmark on their narrative path. Coup de Grace is no mere aside — it’s crucial for what it tells you about where they’re coming from as players and as a group collaborating together on songs — and as much as their output over the last 10 years on the aforementioned The Wolf Bites Back, 2014’s Back from the Abyss (review here) and/or 2012’s A Eulogy for the Damned (review here) has seen them push more toward hard-landing metal, the stylistic foundation on display throughout “Made of Rats,” “Getting High on the Bad Times,” “Born With Big Hands,” “Monkey Panic” and others from Coup de Grace can still be heard in their sound. They are, then, persistently themselves in what they do.
Unfuckwithable? Pretty much.
As always, I hope you enjoy.
Thanks for reading.
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I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to having these songs stuck in my head for the next few days. I had wanted to close out last week with this record, even had the back end stuff on the post ready to roll out once I actually got the writing done, but there turned out to be too many announcements coming in last Friday to make it happen in the time I had available. And I can’t really fool myself into thinking anyone’s weekend beyond my own hinges on what I feel compelled to say about a 20-year-old Orange Goblin album. Truth is, I just like writing about them and was bummed to have to push it back. But we got there eventually.
Here’s how the rest of December looks:
— Next week is not the Quarterly Review.
— The week after is. I need to look over the next week, because I might have two full weeks’ worth of stuff and if I do, I’m going to do half in December and half in January, five days each with 50 records for a total of 100.
— The week after that is the Xmas holiday. My goal is to have my Best of 2021 stuff up by Xmas Eve.
— After the holiday I don’t really have a plan yet, but hopefully I can either wrap up some final 2021 reviews or start on stuff that’s coming out in January. We’ll see.
If past is prologue, I’ll be playing catchup forever with this stuff, but who knows. I’ve managed to successfully get through every year-end whatnot to this point, so I’m reasonably confident I can do so again, no matter how many rolled eyes I might garner from The Patient Mrs. in the meantime. Well earned, all of them. I am, in fact, ridiculous, and I do these things to myself.
I’ve got about an hour until The Pecan’s bus drops him off and I need to make Gimme Metal playlists — two of them, because of the holiday — and set up stuff for Monday so I can write probably over the weekend as much as possible, so I’m going to leave it there. Motivation to get up in the morning has been nil, so I’ve been doing my best to accommodate that. I’m very tired. It’s kind of my thing.
But again, the stuff that (I think) needs to get done does, and even if I end up having to move an Orange Goblin Friday Full-Length down a week, ain’t nobody crying but me. So there.
Please add your picks to the year-end poll.
Please buy Obelisk sweatpants.
Please be kind to each other. Have a great and safe weekend. Hydrate, celebrate love, be cool like you are, watch your head. I’ll be back on Monday and kicking around on the laptop as much as possible this weekend.
FRM.
Tags: Coup de Grace, London, Orange Goblin, Orange Goblin Coup de Grace, Rise Above Records, Scott Reeder, UK
