Fire! – Testament

There’s a bit of the Lizard King about ‘Work Song For A Scattered Past’, the opening salvo from the latest Fire! album Testament, with its souped-up swagger and whiskey-soaked, careening strut redolent of everything from the ‘Alabama Song’ and ‘Back Door Man’ to ‘Wild Child’, the ‘Roadhouse Blues’ and ‘Been Down So Long’ which serves as a loaded riposte to ‘Love Her Madly’. On all of those Doors albums that sound came courtesy of Ray Manzarek’s keyboard bass and a slew of session musicians, including Larry Knechtel and Doug Lubahn, the jazz bassist Leroy Vinnegar, the blues rock pioneer Lonnie Mack and Elvis Presley’s last bassist Jerry Scheff of the TCB Band, but on Testament the burden falls squarely on the shoulders of Johan Berthling, who adds a saunter and a slide to that old walking bass, proud and brash, leering and a little bit glassy-eyed as it cuts a swathe right from the outset of the composition. For their eighth album as a trio – without including their ensemble work as part of the Fire! Orchestra, whose recent wayfarer Echoes proved one of Culturedarm’s favourite records of 2023 – Fire! spurn all the accoutrements of flutes and electronics, extras and special guests, recording live in the studio to analogue tape with Berthling’s bass suspended by Mats Gustafsson’s squalling and chafing sax, cut through by Andreas Werliin who keeps up an incessant march behind the drum set.

Steve Albini produced the session at his Electrical Audio facility in Chicago, a handy choice as there’s a spiritual kinship here with some of Albini’s favourite records like the burnished blues funk of the early Stooges albums and his own recorded output as part of the widely influential, stripped-back noise rock trio Shellac. Gustafsson, Berthling and Werliin round some of these corners and attain a throbbing sort of intimacy, left to their own devices while safe in the knowledge that Albini will capture all of the nooks and crannies as well as the raw power of their performance.

Peeling away ‘The Dark Inside of Cabbage’, the second track on Testament is defined by a discordant and therefore anxious and quavering blend of dolorous horn and scattershot percussion, while ‘Four Ways Of Dealing With One Way’ settles into a slow and specious stomp. Snarling and sputtering mouth mantras before stalking out their terrain, on the penultimate piece ‘Running Bison. Breathing Entity. Sleeping Reality.’ the trio tramp a stealthy pass and stretch out into the big blue yonder, with Gustafsson’s achingly elegiac sax and Werliin’s brittle billowing drums charting a course, untrammelled as Berthling’s bass just keeps adding fences. That leaves then ‘One Testament. One Aim. One More To Go. Again.’ where saxophone slurs, a stepping and sloping bassline and percussive bric-à-brac finally coagulate into a molasses-thick, stonking climax.