The year is 2005: I was in year 9 in high school and was well into my era of loving crushingly brutal heavy metal, sludge filled grunge and my hidden way underneath a secret love of pure, dumb, bubblegum pop.
Being in a small country town, the only access we had to music was the single record store in town and the local newsagent where I would buy and read music magazines.
I would usually flick through Rolling Stone but it was too mainstream for me at the time (yes, I was obnoxious back then. I'm sorry), I would read the classic rock magazines with the opinion that 'Old Music' is better than new music (I said I'm sorry, ok! I have changed. I promise) but the main magazines I devoured were Kerrang and Metal Hammer, the later being the best value for me because it would include a free CD with each issue and occasionally, on the best days, a DVD filled with new heavy music for me to discover.
The DVD issues were always great because you could watch a huge mix of bands from different genres: Black Metal, Viking metal, Death Metal, Emo/Screamo, which I usually skipped because emo 'wasn't heavy enough' (I should've just done a blanket apology at the start for most of my highschool opinions), and would include live tracks, interviews and music videos.
I forget which specific issue it was but I was working my way through the DVD one day, skipped past a couple of emo songs and then onto the screen of my very old television came this image...
At first I thought it was going to be some black metal band, in Corpse paint, holding some satanic sermon. The song was called Burning Beard by a band called Clutch. That didn't sound heavy. I might skip it. But then, the band appeared...
Clutch? Who's that?
Who were these bunch of Dads?
Then, the there was lyrics...
Every day, I wake up we drink a lot of coffee and watch the CNN
Every day, I wake up to a bowl of clover honey and let the locusts fly in
What? And what the hell was this time signature they were playing in?
Every time I look out my window same three dogs looking back at me
Every time I open my windows cranes fly in to terrorize me
I was puzzled. This band that looked like a bunch of men who got together on the weekend to play a set of covers at the local pub were playing the most exciting thing I had heard since I started buying Metal Hammer. They didn't wear chains, didn't have long hair, weren't screaming, didn't have wild guitar solos... they just fucken rocked. Hard.
The lyrics are still some of the best bits of weird poetry with hidden layers and meanings that I've heard.
Swan diving off the tongues of crippled giants
Okkam's razor makes the cutting clean
I was hooked and had to find out more.
I bought the album Robot Hives, then went back and got Blast Tyrant. Then over the years, Clutch have become one of my favourite bands.
They pulled me out of so many shitty preconceptions I had about music, people and life in general.
Oh this burning beard I have come undone
It's just as I've feared, I have, I have come undone
A decade or so after first hearing them, while hosting my community radio show, I played a Clutch song. The text line lit up with people asking 'who is this? It's great!'. These listeners would then fall in love with the band the same way I did.
I guess the moral of this story is to not judge books by their cover. Enjoy the stuff you like, even if it's not what you have painstakingly engineered your entire personality around. Admit that it's ok to like different things and that your opinion on music is subjective and can also be flat out wrong.
Oh. And go and listen to Clutch.
