4 out of 5

Produced by: Kurt Ballou

Label: Deathwish

Acid Tiger – a trio of known quantities from groups like Converge, United Nations, and Bloodhorse – dropped their sole, self-titled album on Deathwish, home to several of those named groups along with a billion other well-respected ones, and the disc seemed to be met with a fair amount of backlash…

…Which I can sort of get.  Opening with a Ben Koller attack on drums, and with the legacy of the players and their various bands behind it, you can’t help but expect something massive to occur.  And it does – the group attacks every song here – but not quite in whatever mind-blowing, ear-destroying, impossible way our brains were likely imagining.  Acid Tiger is also one of those ‘always on’ experiences, such that that mash-up of punk and hardcore sprinkled with stoner rock is fully on display on opener ‘The Claw,’ and then never expanded on much thereafter.  But if you possibly step away from expectations – if you heard this with fresh, unknowing ears – you’d be amazed by how many fills Koller fits in; by how tight bassist Lukas Previn’s and guitarist Adam Wentworth’s interplay is; by how energetic are Wentworth’s shouts and talk-sings throughout.  Acid Tiger is a damn fun album, stuffed to the gills with riffy noodling and amped-up breakdowns, and a worth-it-for-the-cover price drum solo on the appropriately titled ‘Big Beat.’

Lyrically, ‘fun’ may be not what Wentworth was going for, as there seem to be some snipes at the negative direction the world is taking, but he doesn’t quite stop to highlight any particularly notable lyric along the way to sell it, so what comes across moreso is his enthused bleating throughout, never crowding the riffs but always there to punctuate tracks as needed.  Things tend to lean more toward punk and rock than hardcore – I was very much reminded of a Call Me Lightning sense of 70s appropriation – but producer Ballou keeps the sound grounded and raw, allowing the group to flit between speedy noodling and then diverges into rock; occasional hardcore breakdowns.

Side projects are good for stepping out from your usual persona.  I kinda hated Roy when I was listening to that under the umbrella of Botch / Harkonen, but years later, taken on its own terms, I love Roy.  Acid Tiger isn’t Converge; isn’t All Pigs Must Die.  But if you just listen to them as Acid Tiger – they produce some damn quality rock.