PENTAGRAM — Show 'em How (review)

PENTAGRAM — Show 'em How album cover Album · 2004 · Doom Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
1/5 ·
Warthur
Pentagram's history post-Be Forewarned has been a troubled one, to say the least. With the lineup disintegrating, Bobby Liebling and Joe Hasselvander kept going as a two-piece, and whilst Review Your Choices was a genuinely impressive album and one of the band's best, the following Sub-Basement was a bit more uninspired. Then even Hasselvander left behind Liebling, leaving the Pentagram frontman to eventually make this album with Internal Void putting in instrumental duties.

A cursory look at the track list reveals the first major issue with the album: seven of its ten tracks are re-recordings of old material from the legendary Pentagram demo tapes. Pentagram fans will most likely have superior editions of most of this stuff in the form of the First Daze Here compilation (and the sequel if they're feeling completist about it), and the fact that after two or three decades Liebling is still reliant on recycling this old material suggests an almost unbelievable lack of inspiration. Of course, most Pentagram albums from the 80s onwards have included at least a few of the 70s tracks, but that's the other part of the problem - all the best songs have already been rerecorded on previous albums, leaving Show 'Em How with the dregs.

The other issue with the album is that Internal Void just don't put in a particularly good performance - they appear to lack enthusiasm and don't really do the old material justice. One wonders whether they were excited or interested in the material at all; I kind of suspect they only took on the project out of pity for Liebling, whose personal life and public behaviour were deteriorating at this point. Either way, with instrumental playing which isn't at a Pentagram standard and a selection of songs which represent Liebling scraping the bottom of the barrel, Show 'Em How shows a band in crisis.
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