Neurosis’ career is one that’s essentially been defined by evolution. While they’ve come to forge a sound uniquely their own, defined by slow, unfurling riffs and deep, dark layers of texture, their early works were very much formative efforts. It isn’t that their second album, ‘The Word As Law’ is a bad album. But is isn’t what fans of Neurosis would necessarily recognise as a Neurosis album.
The album’s opener, ‘Double-Edged Sword’, comes on more like Rollins Band than, well, anything really, bringing a vintage hardcore punk style together with a keen metal edge. The bass boogies along nicely on ‘The Choice’, and if ‘Obsequious Obsolescence’ sounds like a preposterously overblown title, it at least packs a certain post-punk punch behind the nihilistic punk vocal hollering. The seven-minute ‘Blisters’ is slower, heavier, more grinding, and perhaps hints with more focus at the direction the band would subsequently take, but it’s still not Neurosis as we’ve come to know them.
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‘The Word As Law’ is perhaps more easy to appreciate, then, purely on its own merits rather than necessarily in the context which has subsequently come to frame it. It’s got plenty of power and poke, and while it’s very much of its type a raw, there’s a energy about it which hits like a fist.
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