Listening to Clutch is like taking mushrooms with your gruff, but wise, uncle. For nearly twenty-five years frontman Neil Fallon, guitarist Tim Sult, bassist Dan Maines, and drummer Jean-Paul Gaster have embodied a humble, salt-of-the-earth attitude towards making music, while also flying off into big-concept esotericism at every opportunity. They play accessible, rowdy rock with blues and funk influences while singing about Henry Ford, cosmic revelations, and robot overlords. It’s a difficult line to walk for a quarter-century and remain compelling. And while they haven’t reached widespread stardom, they have maintained a respectable notoriety over the years, giving their refusal to alter course a twinge of nobility. I can’t call their music “timeless,” but I will assert it exists in a space outside of the rapid-cycling generational trends us normal folks are caught in. Clutch is an anchor in an otherwise untethered industry, a stubbornly reliable sound. The gold-standard for psychedelic, scruffy, dude-metal. (Granted, I’m not sure how many other bands could be categorized in this genre, but any hypothetical contenders are playing in these guys’ shadows.)

Book of Bad Decisions is Clutch’s twelfth studio album and marks its first time working with Nashville producer, Vance Powell. The shift in production hasn’t wildly altered Clutch’s sound, but there is more of a country/soul twang on this album than previous endeavors, which improves the listening experience. The addition of a horn section, bright and brash, elevates the straightforward guitar riff into something closer to a big-band anthem on “In Walks Barbarella.” A piano, keys being beaten out in honkey-tonk staccato, gives “Vision Quest” foot-stomping rowdiness as Fallon sings and shouts about going on a bender with the grim reaper: “Oh Pale Rider, you need a hella talking to / Why don’t you leave me be, I got things to do.” Powell’s touch lurks on the fringes adding a new dimension to the music and a thematic tie to the American heartland, which functions as a catalyst for the anxiety and anger that runs through the album.

Clutch has never been a band that puts concept ahead of the music, but many of its albums are loosely held together by a theme. Psychic Warfare was an homage to Philip K. Dick and delved into a world of psychedelic paranoia, mind control, and X-ray vision. Robot Hive/Exodus was, in part, a treatise against the encroaching omnipresence of technology—giving us the awesome experience of hearing a chorus sung in binary code—which has roots in Dick as well. Looking at it from a wider lens, a more appropriate way to put it is that Clutch is thematically informed by slipstream narratives and a distrust for technology, religion, and government. Book of Bad Decisions takes this and turns its attention towards the sociopolitical disaster that is 2018.

Rather than judge or proselytize, the album is content to observe and record the strangeness and tension of the moment, pointing a finger at its surroundings and shouting, “Shit is getting pretty crazy, huh?” This sentiment is most overt in “Weird Times,” on the chorus of which Fallon sings only, in his gravelly impassioned manner, “Weird times / Maximum full blown / Weird times / Destination unknown.” It’s so hammer-meets-nail you can’t help but laugh a little and join in.

We get another wry offering with “How to Shake Hands,” which puts Fallon on the campaign trail for the office of the President of the United States. His winning platform includes putting Jimmy Hendrix on the twenty-dollar bill and publicly disclosing all information relating to UFOs. The lyrics are fun and wild but pack an added punch when you realize that we live in a reality in which anyone can be president.

My personal favorite on the record is also the weirdest. “Ghoul Wrangler” is a raucous song that rides big fuzzy guitar strums and a crashing drumline as it tells the story of a simple farmer whose property has become infested by lawyers: “Thirteen bloody litigators feasting on the hog / My God, Mabel, we got lawyers in the barn.” It is completely ridiculous and delivered with utter seriousness. Fallon bellows with the frenzy of a Pentecostal preacher, and even though we are in on the joke, we are transported to a world where lawyers in the barn are no laughing matter. It ends with the pests being dispatched without mercy and Fallon declaring, “We got different laws down on the farm.” There’s enough of a remove from reality for the track not to ring as an indictment, but, given the failures of the judicial system to protect the people it serves, it’s timely enough to mean more than its saying.

The fact that Fallon hasn’t gotten more recognition as a songwriter is baffling. While Clutch is known for playing solid rock music, the lyrics consistently take its albums from good to great. Book of Bad Decisions is no exception. The writing is explosive, complex, compelling and Fallon delivers it like a man seized by the spirit. Lines like, “Despite the violence, sometimes I look back / a nostalgia begins to take hold / Wisdom of sorts is found in due course/ in the rows of silver and gold” could be parsed apart in a literary seminar. It’s exciting to know that there is a band that isn’t pulling punches.

Taken as a complete package, Book of Bad Decisions sees Clutch traversing a warped facsimile of America, stopping occasionally to drink with Death or speak to Emily Dickenson (which happens on the aptly titled “Emily Dickenson”). It’s a hell of a ride, a gut-busting rock album by one of the most consistently great bands still playing. For those looking for a pointed political statement, you won’t find it here, but if you’re interested in something that captures the emotional texture of this moment—the bewilderment, anxiety, and preposterousness of it all—and rocks out while it does so, then look no further.

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Author Details Jordan Ranft Author Jordan Ranft is a California Bay Area native. His poetry has appeared in ‘Rust+Moth,’ ‘Midway,’ ‘(b)oink,’ and here. He has worked as an arts/culture and music writer for The East Bay Express, Sacramento News & Review, and Brokeassstuart.com. He’s at a point in his life where a lot of his favorite musicians are also his friends. It is delightful. Follow him on twitter, or don’t.

