You’ll be hearing a lot about Dax Riggs this year. Not to mention Acid Bath. After a first aborted comeback attempt at Sick Sad World (which got canceled), the mythical and influential sludge band will finally return to the stage in 2025 for a few US festivals. The 2025 fashion trend? Pogo The Clown shirts slowly replacing Slayer in the metal chicks’ wardrobes — the dark (and mercantile) side of this stunt. Let’s hope it will also help bring Dax Riggs’ (all too short) discography back in the spotlight. Needless to say that, 28 years after their last show and his first solo album in 15 years, these announcements came as unexpected. We had to talk about “7 Songs For Spiders”, and what the band and this absolute rock frontman of the 90s represent.
Did he sign a pact with the Devil to become a blues virtuoso like Robert Johnson before him? If so, he didn’t need to. In any case, the presence of the Evil One shines through his work, and perhaps even more so in this third effort, where he innocently and sincerely explores real demons and those buried deep within himself.
The album is brimming with so much fuzz that the ground shifts beneath your feet, turning your living room into a sticky swamp, close to South Louisiana where these seven tracks were recorded. Without warning, with an angelic smile, Dax Riggs invites you to breastroke through the darkness. He blackens songs with kohl. “I got my soul all tanglеd up in a song”, he repeats over and over. He invokes demons, the undead, Lucifer, serial killers, ghosts, which he stages in cemeteries or through religious allegories. This way of presenting his songs is deeply inspired by the culture of his native Louisiana, between Creole traditions and voodoo myths. In “Pagan Moon”, he asks a young man “if he knows he’s dying and that his darkness is shining” or, aware of the end of the world, he sings that “even the stars are falling”.
Rarely have you heard anything more poetically pessimistic. So fuckin’ 2025. With a dark side must comes light, and we readily acknowledge his undeniable gift for capturing the beauty in darkness. The latter becomes synonymous with hope, at times carelessness, on masterpieces such as “Sunshine Felt The Darkness Smile”, “Blues For You Know Who” and “Graveyard Soul”.
There’s only a thin line between the jinxed, dangerous seminal sludge of Acid Bath to poetic swamp blues. Yet his work is far from Manichean, and not as balanced as Yin & Yang might be: through his artistic meanderings and mystical fog, a soothed Dax Riggs lets us know that he has figured out how to live with and accept his demons. A bit like accepting that death is part of life. Although stripped-down and minimalist, the whole thing sounds much heavier than his two previous albums. What hasn’t changed though? His voice. Riggs is certainly the most underrated rock crooner of this cursed generation. Less famous, husky or flayed than Mark Lanegan or Layne Staley’s, it’s nonetheless heartfelt and… terribly soulful. It’s almost a shame to drown it in a haze of reverb.
7 songs is far too short. Not enough to weave our own spider’s web where all the bruises of our souls would come to rest. The good news is that the frontman has started a studio and seems to have plenty more songs to record. We told you that you will be hearing a lot more from Dax Riggs from now on.
Last modified: 6 February 2025
