The Heavy, not just a playable class in Team Fortress

By gaiJEN, stranger in a strange land

n writing, you should never start a story with a cliché. It’s a bit of intellectual laziness that is immediate even to the casual reader. If someone has already heard your opening gambit, then where is the motivation to keep reading? When embarking on a bit of persuasive writing, say – to convince people to listen and like the same artists you listen to and like, it is especially abhorrent to deploy the ‘though-terminating cliché’. The todschlagargument (yeah, that’s German) goes about its life to do one thing – stop debate. If your younger years were anything like mine, you would have been exposed to the darling thought-terminator of parents everywhere: “Because I said so, that’s why.” How does one recover? You can’t in any meaningful way, which is the very point of the thing. Even knowing the sneakiness of the todschlagargument, the diabolical unfairness of using this as the premise of my argument, I am still sorely tempted to say, “You will listen to and like The Heavy because I said so.” I’d like to think that this appeal to authority (my authority should be unquestionable, I mean, I am the one writing the review and you are the one reading it) would be enough to convince you that you must/need/want to go out and procure the discography of the Heavy by legitimate means or other. However, I fear that you might be as contrarian as the small children that this argument rarely works against so I will try to convey why I think that The Heavy is a brilliant band deserving a spot in your musical library.

The Heavy’s 2007 release Great Vengeance and Furious Fire is a slow moving river of languid lovely funk-soul with intermittent rapids of bad-ass horns, guitars and falsetto sighs. Lead singer Kelvin Swaby’s voice is hypnotic, his rasping vocals on "Brukpocket’s Lament" push and pull you into a unintentional sway and your head begins to nod in time to the noir backbeat and you imagine yourself in the blue-dark shadows of an underground jazz club while the back lit band weaves it’s spell around you and ghostly cigarette smoke swirls into the upper reaches of the small room.

• "Colleen" is vintage R&B groove with hints of James Brown and Prince thrown in the mix, just to, you know – make it interesting.
• "Set Me Free" picks up the pace much like a train picks up speed as it leaves a station. The tambourines conjuring the sounds of the metal wheels on the track, the rolling melody like the hills and dips of a landscape seen through a moving window.
• "That Kind of Man" is the murkier side of Motown, a muddy futuristic reimagining of the sixties and seventies.
• "Doing Fine" sounds like the sighs a junky hell-hole of a house might make as its inhabitants drink cold coffee and sleep on greasy couches while a rainy winter storm brews to the west and wet leaves gather in the hollows between the sad trees.
• "Girl" is a funny British riff on the Beastie Boys, Girls. I don’t know that for certain, but it feels right to say that, and I am the expert here.
• "Who Needs the Sunshine" starts out like the theme music to an afternoon soap-opera, a semi-dramatic piano that, by itself is sort of cringe inducing. Layered under a bluesy beat and scratchy plodding vocals, however, you can’t imagine the piano sounding any different or even the need for it to sound different.

I’m not sure when and I couldn’t be bothered to check, but sometime during 2009, The Heavy released The House That Dirt Built. I’ve only recently purchased the album and so feel a bit ill-prepared to review it, but as ill-preparedness is sort of a constant state of equilibrium for me, I’ll forge on ahead and you can consider yourself forewarned.

• "Oh No! Not You Again!" is a jump around anthem of skuzzy guitar and vocals over samples of what sounds like a house party gone twelve shots of tequila too long.
• "How You Like Me Now" is the first single from the new album and asks the listener how they are enjoying the band. I assume this is a rhetorical question, but if an answer is expected, I say, “Sir, we do not like you now. We have always, and will continue, to love you.”
• "Sixteen" brings to mind a sinister carnival funhouse, where things best un-glimpsed lurk in the shadows. In other words, it sounds like sixteen felt.
• "Short Change Hero" is a spaghetti western wrapped up in a Commodores’ outfit out for a midnight stroll through a black back alley of beats, loops, and catchy lyrics.

And so on and so forth through the rest of the album. (I feel like I can only say that The Heavy is excellent so many ways before it just becomes repetitive and redundant and repetitive).

Now, as far as I know, there are no rules around when one can end with a cliché, so face the music! Follow in the footsteps of greatness! It’s a no-brainer! Love it or leave it! Support the troops! God works in mysterious ways! And my favorite: follow my lead... or the terrorists win.

Don’t let terrorists win.