Ah, the sounds of Black Sabbath. The sludge riffs. The snail-like tempos. The nods to psychedelia and the blues. The seven-minute runtimes. The wails of an individual being flagellated. New Jersey’s Pharaoh resurrect these elements (and bring a few new ones) to the fore with their mostly exceptional debut album, Negative Everything. Listening to this record is like getting a sucker punch to the gut. It’s brutal, cathartic, and haunting all at the same time. However, there are some nice touches: the use of an angelic background choir on first song “Recease”, the fact that “Barthalomew” trudges on in a rather bluesy fashion, the vocals that are pushed so far down in the mix that it’s like trying to look into an abyss to parse them, and the quick step tempo shift in the middle of “The Slasher”. Negative Everything has everything pleasing, all of the elements that cook a dark and black version of mire rock.
“The Slasher” percolates with all of the riffage that Tony Iommi brought to the fore some 40 years ago or more, which the band follows through on subsequent tracks such as “Degenerator” and “Spared”. But if there’s a failing, it is that most of the songs kind of border on sounding the same, and closing track “Drag” feels like a riff off “Recease”. Overall, though, there is strength in these eight numbers, and they cohere enough to create something of a mini-suite. At the end of the day, Negative Everything is pretty positive as a musical statement, and you want to know what to expect upon further releases. While it may not be absolute perfection, it’s still an intoxicating brew of black mud and, as an update on a signature sound, works quite well overall. If you love Black Sabbath, you won’t be able to get enough of Pharaoh.