Life Time

After guitarist Greg Ginn broke up Black Flag in 1986, the band’s final vocalist, Henry Rollins, formed a new band with guitarist Chris Haskett, bassist Andrew Weiss, and drummer Sim Cain, the latter two of whom had been in Ginn’s instrumental side project Gone. On their first album, the songs had the speed and aggression of punk but the intricacy and dynamics of a particularly metallic form of jazz fusion. Weiss and Cain were a supple rhythm team that could drop the hammer, Black Sabbath-style, when necessary, and Haskett was a virtuosic hard rock lead player. Rollins’ lyrics were first-person tales of rage, alienation, and on the vividly titled art-metal dirge “Gun In Mouth Blues,” despair, and his delivery was even more aggressive than it had been with Black Flag, a hoarse, raw-throated howl.