As a music scribbler, I spend my day trying to make whatever record passes under the pen sound exciting, marketable, and necessary, even when it isn’t, especially when it isn’t; I have to find ways to inject a bit of pizzazz into also-ran, landfill indie records, half-baked bearded, big-hatted, singer-songwriters, deluded, digital pop princesses, and a mountain of milder-than-thou mumble rappers. It’s tough at times. But every now and again, a song falls out of the review pile and just sells itself. ‘Heavy Is The Crown’ is such a song.
It helps that before I became the fair-minded, genre-hopping, all-encompassing, pen-slinger for money I am today, I always considered myself one of the foot-on-the-monitor, fist-in-the-air, heads-down, no-nonsense, mindless rock ‘n’ roll tribe. So in a way, this feels like coming home. And if Blacklist Union hadn’t been in the record collection of my formative years, the bands that inspired them certainly would have been.
Blacklist Union aren’t trying to change the world; they aren’t even trying to change rock and roll. They are happy to embrace all its tried-and-tested, traditional sonic traits and weave them into their own idea of what rock and roll should be in the modern age; this is evolution being wrapped up in a sound so exciting it sounds like revolution. As they embrace not just the classic moves and alternative grooves of the genre’s core but play with punk energy and an almost grunge-infused weight, a new but still familiar sound emerges.
Drums pummel and pound, guitars roar and riff, basses boom and brood and Tony West brings that right vocal attack that all great rock and roll needs, one that reminds us that it is always darkness before dawn, that perseverance and steadfastness are some of the most important traits you can possess. Or, as John Lennon once said, “whatever gets you through the night!” (But he also said “ I am the Walrus, goo goo g’joob” so maybe don’t quote me on that.)
And as West screams his missives from the rooftops, ‘Heavy Is The Crown’ reminds the listener of one vital truth: that The Good, The Bad and the Notorious, the album which spawned this beast of a track, can’t drop soon enough.
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