“You don’t like me? I don’t give a fuck” is how Lamont “Bim” Thomas opens Bang Messiah, in the brief, inflamed “Steve Albini Thinks We Suck” (Albini produced the album and likely thinks no such thing). With these words, Thomas kicks off a pulverizing beat that rolls from the hip & swaggers through the album. From here, you traverse a fuzz-drenched, trance-chanted, agitated dream space that tromps over rock, psych, punk, industrial and hip hop genres in one monolithic stomp. Hot off last summer’s free jazz Templo Del Sonido, Obnox returns to home base with the blistering, feedback-fuzzed, beat-driven Bang Messiah.
Bang Messiah booms and swaggers with old-school hip hop rhythms, putting a bone-cracking groove under even the wildest psychedelic explorations.
Thomas brings on MFKN RMX, a Cleveland-area beat maker, to craft slouching, body-rocking underpinnings to these songs; his nickname, Bang Messiah, provides the album title. “40th Street Black” runs closest to hip hop, with its violent spoken-word into, its hustling blacksploitation beat, its rapped-not-sung verse, yet it’s a dense, musically-intricate hip hop with cooling runs of jazz piano cascading through monster block-rocking beats. “Rally on the Street” is likewise socially engaged, starting off with a Southern cop voice admitting, “We just kill people,” and similarly hip hop, but this time filtered through a noisy punk filter.
Elsewhere, Obnox veers into 1960s psych with spiraling, overdriven guitar solos and squalling masses of vibrating organ sound. “I Hate Everything” blares with monstrous, pedal-altered riffs, a freewheeling billow of dayglo colored sound, but even here the hard, locked down rhythm defines structure, with offbeats that go off like fire arms. Tracks like “Cream” and “Wake and Quake” tamp down the volume and soften the contours, with dream-y falsetto’d harmonies, but the beat is a constant, even in the most diffuse settings.
As in Templo Del Sonido,Thomas ingests multiple, disparate influences, processes them internally and spits them out in an array of tracks that are cohesively, recognizably Obnox. Rap, rock, psych and punk are all wrapped in flame and fuzz and distortion and delivered with a stirring disregard for convention. You don’t like it? Obnox doesn’t give a fuck. But you will.