Black Tusk - T.C.B.T.

Standing for “Taking Care of Black Tusk”, T.C.B.T. is Black Tusk’s second record following the death of original bassist Jonathon Athon in 2014, which suggests possible pertinence to the music’s therapeutic nature that the title suggests. After taking care of each other, the band come back again to take care of their musical project and buckle down for another session of the sludgy crossover thrash blend for which they are known. The band don’t exactly pull out much of a wow factor from the tunes on this album, but it’s certainly not disappointing.

The album opens with the ominous and melancholic spoken word “A Perfect View of Absolutely Nothing” and leads into the old-school-y thrash of “Closed Eye” mixed with a bit of the sludge that Black Tusk have become known for and some pretty cool, dark-ish grooves in its second half. The following song, “Agali”, works in a heftier proportion of sludge into a more structured exhibiiton of the band’s signature sound, but it is when the crash of cymbals heralds in an immediate rumble of bass and floor tom thunder at the start of “Lab Rat” that the album really kicks into full gear, probably the album’s best display of the energy the band’s sound can convey. The following song “Scalped” is similarly bass-driven, but at a slower pace at the start and with not any notable increase in power with that slowdown, it feels like an unnecessary buffering of the energy the band had been building up, though its formidably sludgy exit does make up for its lackluster beginning. The allegro “Ghosts Roam” features an interesting section in the middle well supplemented by sludge-typical howls, but is largely is more of a standard cut for the album.

The album’s halfway point, “Ill at Ease”, reintroduces the hardcore punk and thrash elements that slowly dissolved into the band’s sludge after the start of the album and the proceeding track “Rest with the Dead” does well to balance both main ingredients of the band’s signature recipe. The two tracks to follow, however, “Never Ending Daymare” and “Orange Red Dead”, feel like kind of half-baked compositions that lean more toward the quick formatting of hardcore punk. The second-to-last track, “Whispers”, is another standard sludgy trash tune that definitely seems pretty unambitious for Black Tusk, and the album closer, “Burn the Stars”, is similarly characteristic and somewhat disappointingly anticlimactic, even if the sludgy guitar groove near the end is pretty tasty.

Six albums in, there are pretty much no surprises from Black Tusk on this one. Like the title suggests, this album is just the band taking care of business after coping with and adjusting to life after a close tragic loss. It’s an adequate and competent display of the band’s signature sound, but it’s not the best sales pitch for the style to newcomers, just something to temporarily satiate the initiated: solid, but nothing spectacular.