Credits:

Clutch

Few bands have managed to prosper inside a bubble of their own devising and outside the constricting rules of the music business as successfully and for as long as Maryland’s Clutch; who continue to unleash album after album of barely evolving, groovy stoner rock, regardless of label affiliation and changing trends. In fact, the only concession made with their sixth album (give or take a few EPs and “odds and sods” sets), 2004’s Blast Tyrant, was its reported first-time adoption of digital recording, although you’d never really know it from the end results. Of interchangeable sonics with pretty much any of their previous albums, most of Blast Tyrant’s numbers are textbook and unmistakably Clutch, with their punchy, often circular-sounding guitar riffs, gruff vocal delivery, and uber-ironic lyrics distinguished into three by now familiar categories: tales of unfathomably obscure imagery (“Spleen Merchant,” “(In the Wake Of