Album Review: GWAR - "The New Dark Ages"

Is it weird to suggest that GWAR is going back to their roots?  

It doesn’t seem strange to say when measured against the nearly forty-year career of the world’s favorite and longest-running shock rock band, but it does seem out of place when reflected against the mirror of GWAR, who have never been anything but GWAR.

Perhaps the greatest adjustment to the band’s aural idiom over the years was the transformation from a punk band into a metal band, which was initially the product of Cory Smoot (may he rest in peace.)  Musically, the band has never looked back from that flux point circa 2001, and it’s within reason to suggest that GWAR from that moment forward had become more than just an elaborate, can’t-miss stage show.

But what lay truly at the root of GWAR’s legacy is their ability to tell stories, whether that be an utterly ridiculous interpretation of the terribly mundane, or an utterly ridiculous, space-faring story of unfathomable silliness.  GWAR has perpetually been comfortable in both phases, and that’s been the backbone of all their success.  Lesser bands like Lordi have attempted to copy some aspects of GWAR’s implacable stage show, but without the context of the theater of the absurd, it all boils down to a bunch of grown men jumping around in molded foam and plastic.  

“The New Dark Ages” is GWAR’s best storytelling album in more than a decade, easily the most accomplished in this field since “Lust in Space,” and likely going all the way back to 2004’s “War Party.”  Thematically, we see GWAR again as anti-heroes, fighting off insidious forces from deep within the earth that seek to destroy humanity, etc.  

What made the narrative, for lack of a better term, on “War Party” work so well is that events on the real-life planet earth had come to a head in such a way that GWAR was able to easily craft an angry, expressive album.  Through the lens of GWAR’s comedic nonsense, it was easy to decipher the not-at-all-subtle message the band was trying to get across; that they were mad at a world gone crazy with an inexhaustible thirst for conflict, in all forms.

“The New Dark Ages,” by contrast, clearly emotes with obvious exhaustion.  Their first album in five years, and first since the global pandemic, sounds tired.  “Unto the Breach,” which given the band’s usual epic themes would stand to be a rousing metal mosher, is a chugging burn, sounding strained and strung out at even its most spry moments.  It’s as though not just the characters but the artists themselves are weary from picking up their weapons.

Continuing with the theme of throwing up one’s hands and throwing in the towel, “Unto the Breach” is followed by “Completely Fucked,” which actually is the album’s best cut.  It’s the sharpest song on the album, the place where GWAR seems to recover some of their stride and crafts a memorable and infectious riff that will carry the day in concerts for years to come.

Overall though, if it sounds like this review has been preparing to soften the blow, that’s because it is.  “The New Dark Ages” succeeds greatly in constructing a poignant message, but the music also, frankly, sounds tired.  This is as stripped-down and thin a GWAR production as there’s been in recent memory, in some regards taking them all the way back to the early days of low-budget punk.  “Venom of the Platypus” is a fun punk rawker for what it is, but that’s also all it is.

Pushing aside the frailties of the production, there’s nothing musically inspiring here.  Except for those mentioned above, the riffs are all common stock for punk or metal or hardcore, and they just sort of amble about while vocalist Blothar gathers us around the campfire for another depressing story.  Even singles like “Berserker Mode” are instantly forgettable, living in that worst-case scenario of purgatory where the songs are neither memorably good or memorably bad  “The New Dark Ages” possesses little snap, little fanfare, and lacks much of the tongue-in-cheek humor that has always made GWAR’s ongoing telling of the apocalypse seem like such fun.  It is also a startlingly long record, even without the eleven-minute throwaway outro of “Deus Ex Monstrum.”

It’s not hard to imagine why GWAR might be fed up with the whole bit at this point.  It’s fair to reason that nearly every person of comprehending age is world-weary for a variety of reasons, from the menial to the disappointing to the societally critical.  We’ve all been through a lot and even GWAR, at day’s end, is human.  So it makes sense that in 2017 GWAR was willing to rant and rage and sing “Fuck This Place,” and now in 2022, that fire has been quelled.

So in some part this even begs a bigger question: when all of us are looking for artists to pull us up out of the hole and give us some hope, who do the artists turn to for the same?  “The New Dark Ages” doesn’t offer us an answer.