Album review: Black Spiders – Black Spiders

How’s your lockdown going? Will you emerge from quarantine as a better, more rounded individual, having got fit, learned a new language and absolutely nailed your recipe for banana bread? Or have you spent 12 months on the sofa, indulging your basest culinary and cultural instincts?

It’s not hard to imagine which category Black Spiders might fall into. After all, they’ve been in isolation for even longer, having been on hiatus since 2017 (and not releasing an album since 2013’s This Savage Land). They return with a new drummer (Wyatt Wendel), but precisely the same attitude. And from the moment Fly In The Soup arrives on a riff the size of Piers Morgan’s ego, you know this self-titled album is going to display all the personal development of a fitted wardrobe.

And that, of course, is a good thing. Black Spiders may have been away, but they haven’t forgotten what they’re good at: titles that AC/DC would reject for being too clichéd (Back In The Convent, Rock And Roll), but anthems so brilliantly basic (and basically brilliant) they’re like injecting pure essence of Friday night into your eyeballs.

So, Down To The River will have you hollering 'Fuck your peace and fuck your love' at the top of your lungs; the heroically ludicrous Wizard Shall Not Kill Wizard indulges in some none-more-Black-Sabbath doom-mongering; and the growl’n’grind of Give Them What They Want threatens to take Queens Of The Stone Age back to the actual Stone Age.

In short, Black Spiders won’t make you a better person. But as feelgood hits of the lockdown go, this is hard to beat.

Verdict: 4/5

For Fans Of: AC/DC, Queens Of The Stone Age, Motörhead

Black Spiders is out now via Dark Riders.

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