Classic Album Review : Eyehategod - Take As Needed for Pain (1993)
A lot of bands are known for only one song. New Orleans sludge metal legends Eyehategod are primarily known for one record. Although they’ve been active for close to thirty-five years, their 1993 sophomore effort Take As Needed for Pain and, to a lesser extent, the follow-up Dopesick are what immediately come to everyone's mind when they're being discussed. There’s a reason for that. Today, we're going down the Take As Needed for Pain rabbit hole and examine how it defined a genre.
Eyehategod did not invent sludge metal, but they gave it a final form on Take As Needed for Pain. They’ also given the genre an official aesthetic. Filthy and downbeat music with blues southern rock influences echoing a life of bad decisions. Blank, the opener to Take As Needed for Pain, explodes right off the gates like a hardcore punk song before breaking down into a groovy, bluesy and feedback soaked seven minutes descent into incoherent madness. It's vile, shambolic and oozes with despair like an untreated wound.
The follow-up Sisterfucker part 1 is a shorter, more in-your-face blues metal anthem carried by an overwhelmingly fuzzy and filthy guitar riff and Mike Williams' tortured rasps. That barely qualifies as singing, but it has an intensity and a texture to it that no other vocalist really has. Shoplift deviates from the downbeat hardcore punk and southern rock influences a little bit and integrates some powerful grunge riffs to Eyehategod's already rich sound. It feels louder and more expansive than most songs on the record.
White Neighbor (who used to go by another name, I know!) is another absolute riff fest from Jimmy Bower and Brian Patton. It's not that they’re complex or progressive, but they have an understanding of texture and density that few guitarists have and Eyehategod's sound is all about that: filth and pain. 30$ Bag has these bipolar shifts in tempo that make it feel dissonant and unpredictable. It's theoretically perhaps the slugdiest song on the record, but it's also also too shambolic to stand out.
Now, Disturbance is an odd bird. It's been low-key one of my obsessions on Take As Needed for Pain for two reasons: a) it's fucking great b) it's not a metal song. It's industrial music with elements of power electronics. Looping samples of old medical tapes play over one another for an excruciating seven minutes. I love this song to death for its atmospheric quality and I would love Eyehategod to have embraces electronic influences in their career. They do use samples, but not enough. They're fucking great at it.
The title song is another of my favourites on the record. The insanely groovy, grunge influenced riffs clash monstrously with Mike Williams' psychotic performance. It sounds like a homeless man just wandered in the room while the band played and they just taped whatever he shouted into the mic. Eyehategod shines best through this contradiction between hard-living and and educated musical influences and they rarely do it quite as well as they do it on this song. It's another one they still include in their live sets.
Sisterfucker part 2 has this killer scummy bass intro that sets a slower, more harrowing tempo than the first part. Mark Schultz and Joey LaCaze (RIP) just fucking pound your eardrums into a smush. Crimes Against Skin is another forgotten scorcher that would've more loved if it wasn’t on such a charged record. It has some of the chuggiest riffs on Take As Needed for Pain and carries such weight through repetition over six minutes, it feels like the soundtrack to witnessing a beating on a sidewalk of Bourbon street.
The influence of Black Sabbath is all over this record, but I found it was most apparent on the languid Kill Your Boss. It's one of the most punishing, but well-balanced and structured songs on the record. Eyehategod aren’t a structured band by nature, but flexing their songwriting muscle suits them from time to time. Who Gave Her The Roses is almost an outro before the actual outro. Mike Williams' delivery slows down to almost spoken word at some point. It fully embraces the ugliness the band loves to portray.
Laugh it Off is another sample-heavy electronic track. It's a little thinner than Disturbance, but it conceptually closes the record really well.
*
Eyehategod is a band you either "get" or don't and Take As Needed for Pain is them at their most unapologetically discordant and shambolic. It's a band that is more about a particular sound and the evocation of precise feeling than they are about songs to properly speak of. Take As Needed for Pain turns thirty years old in 2023. I love this record to death. It's some of the filthiest, gnarliest and most combative metal ever recorded. It deserves its place in the history of unholy music.
