music, life and all that goes down; from the salty, sinking black hole of mid-cheshire to the elderly-infested shores of Scarborough and beyond...
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I'm all ears...
The oceanic lapse in maintaining this almost-a-feature may have lead some to believe I’d given up listening to ‘real’ screamo anymore, or that perhaps i’d lost the use of my fingers, ears or mind due to a terminally atrocious, pick ‘n’ mix medical emergency of disastrous defects, diseases and near-deaths.
Facts are that no graves have appeared above my bed, breath flows through my lungs and my body displays no visible signs of rot or decay, which is a pleasant surprise.
The hideous truth? I’m not qualified to sit on some perch and spout band name diktats like some all knowing musical Napoleon. That was never my aim or motivation and yet the format of my previous two posts under this bannered pseudonym would very much suggest otherwise.
Having bricked myself in under a title with no apparent room for manoeuvring, I find myself somewhat restricted. Writing about such a non-specific, highly mutable genre with a misleadingly specific label for a header is never going to do, is it?
House Vs. Hurricane need you to buy this album. Forget pirating, borrowing and ripping from a friend’s CD or any other method that doesn’t involve your cold, hard cash ringing through the Austrailian six piece’s collective bank account. Mind you, they’re not after some inflated sales figures or a dollar sign confirmation that they’re not wasting their time, they just desperately need the pennies to at least rent the trial version for a new synth sound. For a band constantly placing their keys at centre stage, they’ve somehow forgotten to invest in anything other than what sounds like a flimsy, plastic keyboard the Early Learning Centre’s music section would be embarrassed to offer up for sale.
Claiming their music as “progressive post-hardcore” and “cinematic hardcore”, House Vs. Hurricane bumble out a sound that combines the worst parts of From Autumn To Ashes, Enter Shikari and Chiodos that is as exciting as it is representative of the prefixed sub-genre they claim to belong. There is nothing on offer here that isn’t shot through absolutely every other below-par “post-hardcore” band apart from an even blander sense of self-convinced satisfaction in their homogenised, cul-de-sac songs.
The first sixty-nine seconds of l’esprit de l’escalier are the blood clot before the brain haemorrhage. Try to stand in its way for the following 15 minutes and you’ll be ripped to shreds. This is progressive hardcore at its sharpest with jaw dropping guitar work, snap wristed, bone blast drumming and the furious vocal cluster bombs of lead singer Steve Watts. This is no tech demo. You won’t be touching yourself to the sound of some self indulgent, poodle haired guitar heroics. Dig your nails in deep and hold on tight. You won’t have the lungs left to admire the scenery.
Throats’ latest self-titled EP is a difficult beast to judge. It does so much right in terms of angry, raging noise making and apparent teeth ripping brutality yet there is something a miss at the heart of all the commotion. The windmilling elephant in the room is Converge’s No Heroes, an album which was surely a massive influence on this 17 minute six track bombshell. Along with the frantic screams, flesh stripping beats and howling guitar reliefs, the doom laden, overhanging darkness that fills every facet of this release marks the EP as a child of its father.
Leeds: the home straight on Pulled Apart By Horses’ latest sprint of shows across the country. This wasn’t any old homecoming however. This was to be the launch of their brand spanking new debut self-titled and, with the help of a few friends, the Brudenell’s favourite adopted sons aimed to throw one hell of a prodigal’s party to celebrate.
First up were Blacklisters, the result of Daughter’s blistering noisecore, the spleen slicing angst of early Glassjaw and the venom and intensity of Converge thrown into a mincer and fired down the throat of frontman, Billy. A razor sharp display of quick witted, broodingly smart hardcore built on brains and brawn.
After building a fearsome reputation on the back of their bruising and brilliant live performances, Pulled Apart By Horses release their self-titled debut full length onto an expectant world in the hopes of ripping a big, beautiful hole out of 2010’s summer.
We begin with Back To The Fuck Yeah as it patters into life. Its an odd choice for an opener that doesn’t quite connect until the chorus kicks in. Once it drops however its a struggle to stop yourself being sucked into its stomping, scuzzy charge into lightspeed. Its the sound of party crasher recollections; of vomit ridden t-shirts telling tales of epic adventures and hazy memories from nights gone by. The scene is set for an album made for the summer months’ late nights to get up to no good with.
With Blood Brothers defunct, Fear Before not shaking anywhere near as oddly as they used to and The Murder Of Rosa Luxembourg all but a faint speck lost to the dust clouds of the near past, who can you turn to for a dose of melodic, spazzed-up hardcore fit for LSD trips on spinning teacups rides? Duck Duck Goose are your new sheet of blotting paper.
Take this band at name value at your peril and open wide for one almighty sucker-punch to the chops. Off Yourself is a work of addled over excitement and attention shredding joy made by men of demented intentions and crazy eyed abandon. With their snarling bass lines, meandering, jazzed up guitars, pounding drums and howling, wailing yelps and screams, Duck Duck Goose spit out round after round of spectacularly unstable hardcore that takes a bite at anything put in front of it. The entire track listing drips with more reckless energy than a fired up hooker stuffed full of Semtex and chilli powder.
Metal is a strange beast. At the same time both an entrenched institution and an escapist counterculture, it thrives off it’s own in-house nostalgic dogma, traditions and conventions whilst demanding a sense of progression and competitive camaraderie from its artists and followers alike.
Wales’ finest, Bullet For My Valentine, have forged a career through an understanding and awareness of their genre that, coupled with shades of that ever-so-accessible Cardiff sound, has fired them to both commercial success and accusations of generica. Fever is no different. For the initiated and interested it’s another effort built on the thrash of old and the post-hardcore revived riff metal of now. Those not so sold on the idea will find the same band that released the unintentionally comic deadpan seriousness of “Scream Aim Fire”.
Forget male vocal choirs. The dominant sound emanating from the welsh valleys in recent years has been post-hardcore pop acts hoping to emulate the mainstream success achieved by Lostprophets and Funeral For A Friend. Kids In Glass Houses are no different. Dirt is an album that seeks to continue this burgeoning tradition by following in their countrymen’s footsteps step by step.
Following on from 2008’s well received debut, Smart Casual, the band have toned down the harder, riffed up moments of their first release in favour of a more inflated take on their tamer, commercial pop-rock side. Dirt is built around the vocal talents and lyrical hooks of Aled Phillips who plays the role of the rasping and wailing, girl friendly focal point as needed. Behind the front man is a band that’s shed whatever bite and venom they may have had in exchange for a far more rounded and generic sound. The results are effective if unspectacular. This is Kids In Glass Houses consolidating their position and playing it safe with a batch of songs ready for the radio and tweenager bedroom walls across the land.
Third Eye Blind return from a six year hiatus since 2003’s “Out of the Vein” and you’ve got to wonder why they bothered.
URSA Major sounds like a Nickelback fan’s take on 30 Seconds To Mars with some horrifically chedder choruses and embarrassingly poor lyrics that kill off any sense of atmosphere or believability that may have threatened to take hold. Lead singer and songwriter Stephen Jenkin’s choice of words are dire ranging from the hilariously literal to the sickeningly generic and awkwardly forced. He struggles to barely contain himself whenever the air turns a giddy shade of blue. Make no mistake, Third Eye Blind are not some fourth wall winking, satire act this is just extremely poor writing.
