CORROSION OF CONFORMITY — Good God / Baad Man as reviewed by Mark J. A statement of intent disguised as a love letter to rock and roll.

CORROSION OF CONFORMITY — Good God / Baad Man (Nuclear Blast) as reviewed by Mark J. A statement of intent disguised as a love letter to rock and roll.

Eight years. That's how long we've been waiting. And honestly? The wait itself is part of the record. Good God / Baad Man doesn't just arrive — it hauls itself in from the wreckage of everything that's happened to this band since No Cross No Crown: Reed Mullin gone. Mike Dean gone. A global shutdown that turned the whole world into a bunker. Pepper Keenan and Woody Weatherman huddled in Mississippi listening to Discharge, Motörhead, ZZ Top, Black Sabbath, Neil Young — the genuine article — and writing. Not demo-ing, not workshopping. Writing.

What they came back with is a double album that feels less like a comeback record and more like a reckoning. A statement of intent disguised as a love letter to rock and roll.

Disc one — Good God — lands like an old friend who just got out of prison. "Good God? / Final Dawn" opens with that unmistakable COC lurch, the kind of riff that sounds like it was dug up from the Raleigh dirt. "Gimme Some Moore" does what the title suggests — honouring Stanton Moore's arrival behind the kit with a track that calls back to the Blind era, all spit and momentum. This is the side of the record that settles debts. With hardcore. With metal. With every year this band spent too long off the road.

Disc two — Baad Man — is where it gets interesting, and genuinely unexpected. The title track drips with '70s cool, Grand Funk Railroad swagger, cowbell and all. "Handcuff County" sounds like it was recorded in a roadhouse that burned down before anyone could call it legendary. "Asleep on the Killing Floor" is a barnstormer — greasy, pissed off, dripping in that particular COC attitude that nobody else has ever successfully cloned. And then there's "Forever Amplified" closing the whole sprawling thing out with gospel-inflected doom and guest vocals from Anjelika Joseph of New Orleans jazz-funk outfit Galactic. That's a closer. That's the sound of a band who knows exactly who they are.

Moore does right by Reed Mullin's memory throughout. He doesn't overplay. He doesn't show off. He serves the song, the way Mullin always did. And Warren Riker — who knows Pepper's instincts from Down — produces with just enough rope for the band to run wild without losing the thread.

Pepper once described this as "a weird love letter to rock and roll." It's that. But it's also a grief record, a survival record, a statement that some things outlast the worst of what life throws at them. COC have done something genuinely rare. They've justified the wait.

https://corrosion-of-conformity.bandcamp.com/album/good-god-baad-man