CHYLD

CHYLD

New Metal

Poison Penns

George “Metal” Smith

When I was a kid my Dad used to take me to this crummy place in backwoods eastern Pennsylvania called Port Carbon to watch auto races. We’d sit on the log bleachers and watch a young dude with the exotic name of Ehrmann Fulk beat the pants off the other dilapidated sportsters. Sitting there in the hot sun with Fulk’s spinning rubber spraying clay and mud into our birch beer was very heavy metal.

The track has been closed for a number of years but less than a mile away, four buddies called Chyld (John Joseph, Bib Haslam, Joey Lee D., and the enigmatically named Rez) have produced a new album, Conception, which maybe even Ehrmann wouldn’t mind giving a spin. Surprisingly, it’s found a home at New Renaissance, Ann Boleyn’s developing indie whose catalog is more than top heavy with thrash. Surprising because Chyld don’t thrash. Not even a little.

Instead, they write complicated opuses on such esoteric subjects as cheap wine and the huge strip-mining shovel (whimsically known as “Marion”) which has been responsible for the slagging of a sizeable portion of their neighborhood. Very Troggsian. And what’s more, these songs have got genuine melody goin’ for ’em which makes them stick out like lepers in a nudist colony among their heavy metal brethren. Don’t think that “melody’’ means the kind of pansy stuff you hear on commercial radio either—in this case it means the songs are memorable and not just vehicles for some flea brain's idea of a good riff.

Leader John Joseph recalls how he and bassist Bib Haslam got started: “We’ve been working steadily on Chyld for the past five years. Through the help of a fan who writes a column for a local music paper [METAL ASIDE #1: The rag in question is an infamous Pennsylvania tabloid of low editorial standard wherein bands actually pay for the “privilege” of a cover story] we shopped our demo to a few companies. Ann and Jeanne from New Renaissance were very excited about what we were doing from the beginning.”

John then adds how Chyld encountered some resistance due to their unique style, which doesn’t fit easily into metal’s narrow pigeonholes. “Some people just couldn’t hear our ‘sound.’ As I see it, we’re in our own ballpark. Our rules. All we have to do is to get the fans to listen. If they do, and I think they will, we’ve got an entire open field ahead of us.”

Entangled baseball and football imagery aside, Joseph is certainly right. Chyld have a very unique style which one dunce likened to Max Webster [METAL ASIDE #2: I don’t hear it. The only thing in common between the bands is that they are/were off the beaten track. Pye Dubois and Kim Mitchell wouldn’t have been caught dead writing lyrics like, “So you take another chance/Soon you won’t be needin' those pants” from Conception title track] but which is more probably an outgrowth of schizophrenic listening to REM, Zep, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and AC/DC’s Powerage. And it’s pretty good.

Since there’s nary a venue within a good hour and a half drive from Port Carbon (the closest was a C&W bar up the street—seems to me Chyld might be a wee bit unwelcome there), Joseph and Haslam are non-plussed about their present status as heavy metal Steely Dans. “We can pull the album off onstage; it’s not a problem,” Big adds.

Here's to hoping that they get that opportunity soon in front of the appreciative legions of metal and that they don’t end up like, say, the Ultimate Spinachcrushed by expectations they can’t begin to live up to.