Back in the ‘80s, they clogged the racks of nearly every record store: private press metal albums by local yokels attempting to cash in on whatever the current trend in heavy music was. There were bands that looked like Metallica and bands that looked like Stryper; there were Yngwie-biters and mock Maidens. They were, for the most part, completely unremarkable, especially the further one got from New York/L.A./London.

The town where I grew up – Columbia, South Carolina. – was pretty far from New York and Los Angeles and London, if not geographically, then definitely culturally. Despite – or perhaps due to – being the state’s capitol, the city marinated in a particularly Southern stew of backwardness, false purity, suburban sameness, and good ol’ boy judgment.

Yet, like most other mid-sized shitburgs spread across this country, it was (and is) home to a surprising number of very, very cool people. And most of those cool people made ritualistic visits to a tiny downtown record shop known as Manifest. The store jammed a ton of cool shit into its limited real estate, but despite the variety of material in those racks, the store beat with the cold, black heart of heavy metal. The owner hosted the college radio station’s weekly “Massive Metal” show and lived, it seemed for exactly three things: beer, money, and Motorhead. He ran his store pretty damn tight, and with the help of a staff of specialists, Manifest always managed to get exactly the right record into the right hands.

As Columbia metal fans can attest, though, there was one album in those racks that never seemed to make it into anyone’s hands. It was one of those aforementioned private press metal albums, adorned with hand-drawn artwork that split the difference between Planet of the Apes and some psycho-vaginal art-class nightmare. It was Animals, an album by local guitar-slinger Dwayne Warr, known on his albums as DWARR.

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Clutch fans have become somewhat accustomed to expecting the unexpected from the band. So, with Strange Cousins from the West, they must certainly be wondering what the surprise is gonna be this time. Well, oddly enough, what’s most shocking about Strange Cousins is the fact that Neil Fallon & Co. have decided to stay the course, continuing to deliver the same sort of clean and direct blues-rock bludgeoning they began to dabble in with 2005′s excellent Robot Hive/Exodus and 2007′s From Beale Street to Oblivion. As much as Robot Hive was a neck-snapping departure from Blast Tyrant, it’s been weird to watch the band stay on this stylistic path for three entire records; one almost could be forgiven for expecting that this new disc would find Clutch heading into some new direction.

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There are a few phrases that tweak the highly attuned sensors of professional music journalists. The one that frequently sets off the bullshit detectors is “highly anticipated debut.” Debuts, by their very nature, are seldom anticipated by anyone not in a band, working for a band or related to or fucking a member of the band. (And in the case of the latter, the anticipation is mainly along the lines of “Now maybe they’ll please just shut up about how the record’s coming out soon.”) The entire rest of the world is unlikely to be anticipating a debut because they don’t know anything about the band in the first place… because, after all, this is their debut we’re talking about.

In the case of Burning Human, however, a considerable amount of slack should be given to their describing their own studio debut album as “highly anticipated.” Why? Because after nearly a decade and a half of forming the band, these guys finally got around to releasing a full-length studio album. Burning Human was founded in upstate New York way back in 1995 and, based on the strength of a pretty rad demo tape (Death is Mercy), looked to be ready to take on the death metal world. As you may have realized, they did not (although drummer Jason Bittner hasn’t done too poorly for himself in Shadows Fall) and they split up in 1997, coming back together for the inevitable Reunion Nobody Asked For in 2007.

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