CHRIS CAFFERY - "Faces" + bonus "God Damn War
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CHRIS CAFFERY – “Faces” and “Godamn War”
(Black Lotus)
Running time : CD1: 76:41 CD2: 42:45
Chris Caffery is a guy that has been with SAVATAGE since the tour for their highly acclaimed “Hall of the mountain king”. And he’s been the bands main guitarist since the tragic death of guitar wiz, Chris Oliva. In that respect he’s a sort of metal veteran. But veteran or not, he ain’t some kind of dinosaur. And as he told us in the interview that we did with him, he ain’t ready to call it quits just yet. Little known is his involvement in a fine little release of a really harsh, heavy, husky metal beast that is DOCTOR BUTCHER’s eponymous album, which really pays tribute to the proto-SAVA sound and even gets more raw at times. I didn’t know to expect something like that, or something different in this, Chris’s first solo album. Well it’s a kind of a weird, different beast altogether, from what Chris has given us in the past. Well there’s almost two hours worth of music on offer and if his record company would have allowed him, he wouldn’t have hesitated to make his debut a quadruple album. It’s raw in places, it’s well pissed off, it has elegance in other places, it has force. A little bit of everything. Well the title “Faces”, is really spot on. Mr. Caffery has captured different moments, different thoughts and different moods with this record and has also created a little concept, a time-line if you will of the recent war in Iraq, questioning the sanity, the morality and the motives behind it.
Let’s inspect Faces first : We got tracks raging from the almost Euro-power (?) of the title track, to the more intricate “Fade into X” or the mania of “Pisses me off” one of the catchiest tunes to be found on the record. There’s also “Music man” and “Bag o’Bones”, the first really sweet, melodic, heartfelt and really sort of well placed in the track sequence, I almost expected such a song to be there, and there it was and the latter groovy and funky, another quality tune that really made my day. There are about 16 songs here and there’s plenty of stuff for everyone – there are only a couple of tunes that I sort of totally found rather poignant and dull, but hey that’s just a drop in an ocean. The overall sound is so SAVA, but at the same time it’s also personal. I mean it’s evident, straight away that this guy is the guitarist of SAVATAGE, but there’s also character of his own. A large part of that “effect” is all because Chris handles all the vocals, lead and backing himself. This really stamps the songs with his personality. His voice is good, pretty darn good if you ask me. He has a manly, deep, heavy metal, delivery, passionate enough where it has to be passionate, gutsy and angry where aggression take over, more contemporary but never exceeding his abilities. Hence it’s very good. He’s not Tate, he doesn’t try to be Tate and that’s good. Making comparisons with his SAVE counrterparts he kind of reminds me of a rather different sounding Jon Oliva of the early SAVA days without the extremities and definitely nothing like their latter singer and nice Bon Jovi Replica that goes by the name of Zachary Stevens.
Onwards to “Godamn War” it’s a really weird concept, a timeline and a skeptical overview of the Second and most recent war in Iraq. It’s not some super-catchy, easy listening affair. It’s really intense, it’s really angry and it asks a lot of questions. It’s nice to see that there are thinking people in the States. After having read the totally fundamentalist and rather provocative judgmental statements, full of patriotic overtones and religious propaganda of some so-called “High Profile” artists from the States, both metal and popular, I was getting kind of worried that people were just allowing themselves to be force-fed information that they then call their own personal opinion – which they, then, express freely, ah freedom of speech – a really tortured term that has been used to masquerade porn into art, charlatans into authorities, illiterate twats into presidents of Nations, ooops… Well this record is a testament to free thought and I ‘m glad to see that an American has the balls, to ask those questions, instead of just replicating propaganda and hiding behind his finger.
It asks things that “some” people would rather dismiss or keep hush-hush. Politicians may play their games and make speeches and feel free from guilt, when they read passages from the bible to justify the unnecessary slaughter of an awful lot of people, for preemptive purposes, but it’s the little guy that gets fucked in the ass. It’s the soldier that gets slaughtered, the civilian that gets blown up or looses some vital parts, be it a Iraqi or some foreign reporter, the parent that loosed his child, the gas that goes up by 125% and the elderly who might not be able to afford even their medicine, but hey, we can easily afford to spend gazillions of dollars on weapons, because it is “necessary” to take “immediate” action, against some WMDs that are “somewhere”, probably in the fruitful imagination of those that give ultimatums, and ultimately save the day and the world. Ah thank god for all the superheroes that will save us from the world’s destruction in years to come, both on the silver screen and in real life. Oh, the irony. Isn’t thinking allowed after all – just as speech is free too? The whole record is wild, over flowing with passion and uncontrolled, I mean “Godamn War” is most excellent, “Curtains” is so eerie and soul stirring I was made actually sick. It’s really heavy and aggressive but what really stands out is the song “Saddamize”, not that it’s any better than the rest, because they ‘re all, good slabs of heavy metal, but because it’s so fucking weird. There’s a intro- spoken- in a bar- where people are discussing about the war, laughter and then a eastern harmony takes over and it just evolves into a very interesting song.
Overall – I have to congratulate Chris Caffery for finding his own voice, and showing us his many “Faces” and for having the balls to make a statement about what he thinks is right and what is wrong about the war and for not trying to cash in, by writing an obvious ballad, about one of the darkest days of the modern history (9/11) like so many of his contemporaries have.
Faces: 5/6
GDW 4,5/6
Ps. Not that it has any importance (for me music is above all) but this will come out as a double jewel-case, double digipack, double leather digipack and a wooden/metal box.
