There's no escaping the ghost of Pepper Keenan. Not an original member of COC, the man nonetheless spent the 90's reshaping the band in his own Southern-fried image, the early shackles of hardcore falling away entirely to give way to a sort of Dixie Sabbath. Nonetheless, COC have been actively carrying on without him for four years now, and including the hiatus preceding their return to the Animosity lineup it's been the better part of a decade since Keenan has had anything to do with the band he made famous.
Despite the fact that Mike Dean actually preceded Keenan as vocalist by a number of years, he only sang full time on Animosity before turning the mic over to a short succession of revolving door vocalists. So I get the sense that fans of the stoner-friendly incarnation of COC perceive Dean as a sort of grudging interloper. I mean… if you must, but I think a more fitting perception would be that this is an entirely reinvented band, with no more relation to the Keenan sound than the early hardcore stuff.
That said, the two albums released with the rejiggered lineup – 2012's Corrosion of Conformity reboot as well as the new IX – give only a passing nod to the Animosity sound, the latter even less so than the former. If anything COC suffered from a bit of an identity crisis, a transparently deliberate attempt to shake loose of Keenan's influence while still betraying the occasional affinity for it.
IX finds the band more at peace with mining the groove-heavy riffing and 70's boogie that made the band famous. "On Your Way" is the most blatantly retro of the new batch and also the catchiest thing the band have written since Mike Dean resumed frontman duties. "The Nectar" also grooves hard, but bears more of a mid-period doom sound a la vintage Trouble. "The Hanged Man" takes the doom vibe that much further down the left hand path, a sprawling Sabbath riff ringing sonorously over distant, high-pitched vocals.
Dean lacks the effortless charisma of Keenan's breezy singing style, but his unconventional howl gives the band's current sound a stripped down, decidedly less mainstream appeal… even if they aren't exactly attempting to recapture their punk roots. "Denmark Vesey" and "Tarquinius Superbus" are the only songs on the album that lean heavily on that old school hardcore sound, and frankly they represent the two most expendable items on the album, neither of them offering much beyond a simple variety of tempo; if they must exist at all at least they are sequenced intelligently.
It will be interesting to see how this album goes over with the more fence-sitting fans. On the one hand, COC have unequivocally improved on their previous Dean-helmed effort, but in doing so they've veered close enough to the Keenan-era sound that it may invite negative comparisons among the more superficial of those fans. For my part, though I think Mike Dean is an objectively lesser singer than Pepper Keenan I also think his higher pitched style serves an entirely different purpose. There are plenty of bands out there not named Corrosion of Conformity that bite far more of the Deliverance-era sound than the remaining members are currently doing themselves. Maybe it's time to cease holding them to that standard.
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