Album Review: Barbarian Hermit - Mean Sugar
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Manchester sludge quintet, Barbarian Hermit, release their sophomore album, Mean Sugar, early next month which, again, finds a switch in the band’s vocalist. Stepping back into the fold in 2020, replacing Ed Campbell, is Simon Scarlett, last heard on the One demo and its subsequent 2021 revisit.
Having spent three years of gestation, Mean Sugar is nine tracks – well, really eight as the interlude Out Come the Boasts doesn’t count – of some weighty doom-laden sludge, each of which is the band’s comment on the ongoing trials and tribulations of being Northern.
Emerging from post-industrial landscapes and urban-blight is manna for Metal, and lead to the creation of the genre we all know and love; so it’s fitting that Barbarian Hermit have used the fiercely Sabbathian title track to kick things off. Mean Sugar opens with a killer sludge riff, the guitars of Mike Regan and Adam Robertshaw stomp and ooze like molasses, as laconic as anything lumbering from a Louisiana swamp.
The rhythm section plays with consummate ease, Rob and Gareth making light work of such heavy material, and Simon slots back in like he’s never been away. Were Barbarian Hermit to flick a switch to rinse and repeat across the whole running time, Mean Sugar would still have been a solid sludge record.
But they don’t…
Instead, this second helping is an examination of where capable musicians and creatives can stretch a genre. The familiar guitar-drops and tempo changes are settling, the calm before the storm, if you will, before first deviation, Battle of Kompromat. Mike and Adam play off each other as they deliver a crunchy riff, occasionally evoking a Slayer sound, but not the speed, and a Down approach, all mixed into the progressive framework. (Kompromat: the use of damaging information, whether real or implied, about a public figure, with the intent of exerting power.)
Who Put 50p In You bounces like Zebedee, Deadbolt arrives with slow and punching riff and a vocal line not too far removed from Killing Joke; neither Kicking Up Dust nor Stranger than Fiction are covers of Little Angels or Bad Religion songs, rather the former is another Killing Joke sounding tune, with a solid progression and a psychedelic guitar, while the latter is a more direct sludge metal track, more in keeping with the band’s genre alignment, yet isn’t without its interesting features.
The same can be said of Stitched-Up, sitting central to the album and acting as a direction marker for those who think Barbarian Hermit have strayed too far from the path. The seven-minute-plus Heal the Tyrant brings Mean Sugar to a close in a hazy, smoke-filled manner. Easy guitar and drums eschew the weight of some of the earlier material, with a shared vocal and a definitive Seventies feel.
I saw the band playing Uprising Festival in Leicester back in May and they were the perfect act for the time and place. This new collection of songs will, hopefully, land as well as it deserves to do and find a broader audience than might normally be attracted to them. To think of Barbarian Hermit as merely a stoner band is no longer an option.
