Creep (2015) is another crappy found footage movie that holds its own against other found footage flicks about a dude who has some bullshit excuse to film everything he does and has to deal with peril and makes every boneheaded oblivious move which ends in an untimely demise. Oops, spoilers (like you couldn’t figure it out ten minutes anyway)… People talk, film stuff happens, yeah we get it. Roll the credits. A large yellow text spelling out the movie title flashes on the screen to the chunkiest, sludgiest metal riff ever… It was as if The Melvins and early Mastodon fucked on your sister’s couch after dropping 3 tabs of acid and then gave birth 9 months later in a swamp. I thought to myself, “what is this sweet sweet mud being poured into my ears?” As the credits continued I read that the song was Our Mutant, by my new favorite band Big Business.
(This is where it gets interesting; at the end of the movie.)
My first thought was how much it sounded like the Melvins, and my suspicions were confirmed as I read that the band is closely associated with the Melvins and their only two members, Jarred Warren and Cody Willis have both been members of the Melvins for some time. This utterly blew my mind, because Big Business even opened for Tool for their summer tour in the mid 2000’s and for some reason I had never heard of them! Speechless, I turned to YouTube to give them a listen. The first album to pop up was entitled Battlefields Forever. The cover art show a bunch of blonde viking warriors riding a floating lion head with bloody mouth into battle, or celebrating that they just killed and decapitated the giant lion emperor; either way it’s the definition of epic!
The album was released back in 2013 and is their newest album, I could not believe it! They had their first album in 2005 and usually a band has enough time to get tired and produce a horrid shit nugget after 8 years, but Battlefields Forever was amazing! It trudged through a dismal LSD rainstorm in my living room and by albums end I noticed that my shoes were caked with wet clay. I was hooked and I played the next album I could find. It was 2007’s Here Come the Waterworks, which I am currently listening to. It is the same huge sound that had hit me in the face at the end credits of Creep, I had discovered a new band that I actually like! It’s a bloody miracle!
For those of you who are not familiar with the stoner or sludge metal genres, I would recommend diving down that rabbit hole. It will be a very dark and damp experience without that left over layer of goth that sticks to the roof of your mouth. It is badass and bleak and won’t leave you depressed. Check out The Melvins’ extensive catalog (you can start with Ozma or Houdini) and throw in Neurosis‘ Times of Grace and Baroness‘ Red Album (which was named album of the year in 2007). Let the dense waves of sludge metal slowly wash over you and I guarantee you will become a fan of this thought bending genre.
