Drug Church’s new album “Hygiene” is fueled by fury

Drug Church is a side project of Self Defense Family front man Patrick Kindlon that has now evolved to take on a life of it’s own.

Their newest release, “Hygiene,” came out just last month and has already become one of my contenders for the best rock and roll album of the year.

The second track on this album is called “Super Saturated,” and I think that title is a pretty great descriptor of the album as a whole.

Every single second is packed to the brim with noise, passion and fury.

This album is only 26 minutes and 10 tracks long, and yet the impact it leaves makes it feel like so much more. Not one note and not one moment is wasted. The production on this album is absolutely delightful. I can tell you from experience that getting vocals to sound as good as they do on this particular record can be an absolute nightmare.

It can be really hard to make layered vocal tracks work, but they’ve been done excellently here.

That combined with some cool processing effects—there’s a lot of delay used to good effect—help to make the vocal melodies really shine through all the noise.

The bass tones are super fat and help to give the mix a lot of the power, and the guitar tones are just absolutely brutal.

This entire album has such a massive, powerful sound. It’s a true testament to how far music production has come since the “Wall of Sound” technique was developed back in the ‘60s.

The songwriting is worth praising as well. Most of the individual riffs these songs are built around aren’t very technical.

What makes the songs special is how all of the parts fit together. The rock-solid production builds a solid base for the sheer wall of sound, but that’s backed up with extra guitar tracks that are expertly employed to reinforce that effect. The songs are written and structured in to take maximum advantage of the production.

There’s also plenty of interesting dynamic contrast—“World Impact” is a good example of that—and a healthy dose of extra melodies to keep things interesting. One thing I appreciated a lot was the way guitar harmonics were used.

They’ve been used on this album to accentuate certain riffs, and they stand out really strongly in the mix each time they appear.

The powerful production sets a high standard that the songs are more than capable of standing up to.

There now comes the question of who I would recommend this album to. I do have to warn you, if you’ve made it this far, “Hygiene” isn’t going to be an album for everyone.

It’s obviously a very noisy, very overwhelming piece of music. Lyrically and aesthetically, “Hygiene” is confrontational at every turn and challenges the listener just by listening to it.

And yet beneath all of the sound there’s still some really solid pop-hooks and melodies. For an album this uncommercial, it’s also shockingly catchy. One of my earlier reservations about this album was the length. “Hygiene” is not a very long album, but when you look at how much is going on in each song, it makes sense. There’s more ideas in here than in albums twice as long.

I’ll leave you with this: “Hygiene” is an insane journey through 26 minutes of pure, unrelenting rock and roll fury. If you’re up to the challenge, it’s well worth experiencing.