What sort of intended audience could Duane Warr have had in mind when he self-released Animals on records back in 1986? In today’s market of countless small labels, mp3 hosts, and self-released CD-Rs, quirky lo-fi albums that don’t fit comfortably into their genre are churned out daily. But 25 years ago, this druggy, cryptic missive from Columbia, South Carolina must have sounded like some truly out shit to whatever ears it might have reached. The music isn’t quite as loco as the Planet of the Apes meets Cannibal Holocaust meets Thundarr the Barbarian cover art would have you believe, but Warr was definitely far beyond driven as he hammered out these tracks, playing every instrument except drums.
The most obvious and deep influence is Sabbath, at its plodding heaviest. It can hardly be a criticism that “Ghost Lovers” is practically a rewrite of “Electric Funeral,” since bands like Electric Wizard and Sleep did the exact same thing with that classic Sabbath template to far more (relative) acclaim and glory nearly a decade later. In the mid-80s, Sabbath wasn’t exactly the hippest metal band, but this southern factory worker seemed to want to reclaim their sound as a bulwark against the watered-down metal that was pouring forth from radio and MTV. “Ah, get the hell off the radio,” Warr growls at the start of “Are You Real,” presumably to the hair metal hordes, before launching into some epic Iommi-esque riffage. To most ears, he would have seemed hopelessly behind the times, the metal equivalent of a moldy fig. His soloing was peculiar, too, most reminiscent of Greg Ginn when Ginn would freak out with those irrational, anti-math rock solos on those great, late period metal-soaked Black Flag records. A couple of instrumentals here resemble a less funky version of Ginn’s trio Gone. And though there’s no way of knowing if Neil Hagerty heard this record way back when (though the fact that his label Drag City is reissuing this makes you wonder), Warr’s playing at times sounds eerily close to some of Hagerty’s on Royal Trux’s 1997 album Sweet Sixteen. (Compare the guitar tone and soloing on Dwarr’s “Lonely Space Traveler” and “Cannabinol: The Function” to Trux’s “Morphic Resident” and “Golden Rules.”)
Drag City has not only deemed Animals worthy of reissue, but a “Hard Rock Masterpiece.” And while that’s going waaaaay too far, the timing of the release is fortuitous. If this had been released 10 years or so ago, we may have heard it as a lone nut harbinger of doom metal. But oddly enough, the tin-can, murky production and oddly placed, weird keyboard and bell tones will sound perfectly natural to ears accustomed to hypnagogic pop frequencies; “That Deadly Night” may in fact be the first hypnagogic metal track.
Despite this, it would be disingenuous to say that Warr was ahead of his time. Though the heavy end of Sabbath that Dwarr was borrowing would become popular with the doom movement, there were still plenty of heads in basements and garages across America playing these seductively simplistic, hypnotic riffs while stoned out of their gourds. And it’s likely lo-fi because Warr couldn’t afford to make it sound any better, not because he was a black metal visionary. So rather than being a document of an overlooked genius/pioneer, Animals ultimately sounds like the record of a talented, highly-motivated, highly antisocial guy who loved metal but also had some unusual musical ideas of his own. Which is to say it’s highly recommended, because that’s more than a lot of metal bands can say these days.
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