on the pulse - 2021 - #23 - the war on drugs, parquet courts, biffy clyro, moron police, frank carter & the rattlesnakes, amon tobin

You know, I was so close to being all the way back on schedule and then the hack happened, but that along with a bunch of solo reviews to try and galvanize traffic means I’m stuck behind again. No worries, we’ll get through this - let’s get On The Pulse!

Amon Tobin - How Do You Live - Well, it’s been a while since we have one of those storied electronic acts with a massive backlog wind up on my schedule - and even then, I’d argue I’m late to the party with this one. But in all due fairness, Amon Tobin is in a pretty interesting lane: initially this Brazillian producer brought a fusion of textured, hardscrabble, noir-adjacent jazz with breakbeat and IDM that at least on the critically acclaimed one-two punch of Permutation and Supermodified really worked for me! But Amon Tobin didn’t stay in that lane - outside of video game soundtrack work, his material got more scattered, ambient, and odd, pulling in more sampling with less of a focus on groove and more on melodic texture, which takes us to this project which was described as a culmination of all of those impulses. And… well, it’s certainly an attempt at the fusion, with shambling but fidgety metallic percussion, warbling and farting synths, fractured guitar elements both acoustic and electric, some truly baffling vocal integrations, all contributing to a distinctly uneasy and unstable vibe where it almost feels like it’s trying to turn the noir elements inside out and rebuild it from the pieces. And I’m just not sure it works - part of it is surrendering some of that sense of subtle, layered groove, as the oily, oblique weirdness isn’t transcendently wild or mind-blowing but the chord structures and textures pulled out of it are just off-kilter enough to leave an odd and not exactly likable taste in one’s mouth. But the cadence of the album feels awkward too - the tracks are already lumpen and misshapen and while they all seem to make sense in this album’s universe, they don’t really build or climax or flow into each other well - a dank, weirdly languid, vaguely disquieting sightseeing tour where there are fragments you might remember, but not exactly because you liked them. It’s a bad feeling when even if you respect the craftsmanship, the album became a chore to get through multiple listens - 5/10, another one of those cases where I went through an entire catalog and feel like I got diminishing returns, hate to say it.

Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes - Sticky - Alright, we’ve got a band from the former frontman of the UK hardcore band Gallows, and one that’s divided fans especially after the hardcore-leaning debut. From there, Frank Carter pivoted hard into a retro-tinged, vaguely prog-leaning alt-rock palette, a little more lethargic and polished but accessible with more clean singing… and unfortunately not that interesting for me. Kind of a shame because you can tell Carter has his heart in the right place with a decent amount of the subject matter and he’s certainly trying to sell it with some intensity against some nice guitar snarl, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that we’re just a half-step away from the forgettable commercialcore that swallowed the blues rock revival a few years ago along with any edge or punch it had left. But apparently this project was intended as more of a cathartic release, not quite a return to hardcore but bringing more bite, and some of the features looked intriguing… and I can say this, it’s probably the closest to liking a Frank Carter project since his more hardcore material, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that while the stylism is way more agreeable, the underlying issues in the formula remain. Yeah, Carter’s vocals are more brash and in your face, and recruiting LYNKS, Cassyette, and Joe Talbot of IDLES make for some obvious winning combinations, especially as this album embraces a more percussive, abrasive dance punk sound that’s showing increased popularity, and Carter still knows his way around a hook, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that this feels tame even for this brand of dance punk. Maybe it’s the production from the guitarist Dean Richardson - he’s produced all of the albums for this band and while it generally sounds fine, you never get that added bit of rawness or flavour to really put it over the top, especially on the hooks where it feels like the really great pulsating and textured bass grooves that drive the verses never culminate with more muscle, instead falling into a weirdly flat place that never allows the hooks or drums to really explode. More to the point, for every cool instrumental addition like the saxophone, you’ll get the grainy, piercing synths and they’re not so much abrasive as just poorly blended and irritating. And then there’s the writing: this feels like one of those albums is probably best enjoyed as a hard-drinking, hard-partying slice of trashy fun to try to avoid the overwhelming bleakness of modern life and small town decay, but while there’s a few lines about questioning a return to status quo after the pandemic, you never quite get the sense that it’s going to land a credible punch; the stylism often overtakes any sense of substance. And there’s nothing wrong with that, because this album can be pretty fun while it’s on… but it doesn’t have much staying power after that, especially as it can feel so beholden to the punk that already did so much of this forty five years ago. So… 6/10, you’ve probably heard a lot of acts similar to this vein, and while it’s fine while it’s here, I’m probably not going back to it.

Moron Police - The Stranger And The High Tide - Full disclosure, I had no idea how this Moron Police EP would turn out - yes, A Boat On The Sea is an incredible slice of progressive rock and metal that came right the hell out of nowhere, but just because you strike gold once doesn’t mean you can do it again, especially given that it came with a shift away from the goofy comedy material. But hey, it’s less than fifteen minutes, it’s probably going to be decent… and yeah, it’s pretty damn fun, but it absolutely reflects a compositional shift for the band that I can see being a little contentious. For one, the album leans a lot harder on acoustic instrumentation going for more of a minor-key western vibe - which for a Norwegian band does slip a little into the uncanny valley in the execution in that it feels a little kooky for its own sake, but the more notable shift is how dark the sound can get, which puts a bit of a damper on their anthemic firepower. Now it’s still tuneful as all hell and impeccably balanced - the guitars hit the precise balance between choppy texture and tune, the grooves have genuine swagger, the progressive flourishes especially in the drumwork are impeccably integrated, and frontman Sondre Skollevoll’s throaty drawl is a good fit - but it’s also obvious this is a short term experiment to work out a few ideas and they might be better for it. That being said, when you delve into the lyrics, the vibe does fit the twisted storytelling on display, confronting projections of authority or even just stability as systems collapse and your own mind begins to unravel - it fits the ramshackle, wild west vibe and gives the project an anxious sense of desperation that keeps up the tension., especially when it’s clear that no real help might be coming, especially if the parachutes might just be … well, a pair of shoes you’ve lost. Thus like A Boat On The Sea there’s an odd bleakness to a lot of the content that I’m not always sure works and leaks through a lot more here… but again, for a nugget of insanely tuneful prog rock, it’s really damn hard for me to complain. So 8/10 - it’s only four songs and will leave you wanting more, but with Moron Police… they make it count.

Biffy Clyro - The Myth Of The Happily Ever After - You know, at some point I really wish any of these long-running rock acts with like a half-dozen albums in their back catalog be remotely interesting - which funnily enough is what I said in passing when someone put Biffy Clyro on my schedule for a song review last year. But now we’ve got an album proper, the sister project to the album from last year, so I figured I’d go through this Scottish band’s catalog. And… I mean, early in their catalog there were some interesting post-hardcore-esque passages and Puzzles is legit great, but that doesn’t excuse a lot of weirdly-paced albums and highly questionable mixing and a considerable stretch across the 2010s that wasn’t remotely interesting. That said, that 2020 album managed to fight through some really questionable production to have more hooks than I was expecting, so maybe this might turn out okay? Well, yes and no - because man, you can tell this is a sister album where they might be playing to the same orchestra-backed semi-progressive rock formula, but the band loaded the tightest melodies and hooks onto the album from last year and this is a follow-up that feels more scattered and clunky as a result. It certainly doesn’t help matters that the production is still messy as hell - the cymbals bleed into the wells of synth, which certainly fits with an underpowered kit for everything except the kickdrum - and then ‘Unknown Male 01’ and ‘Existed’ try to use a drum machine and they sounds even worse - there’s a weedy quality to some of the arranged passages and keyboards that feels too polished to have good texture but is also blended into a mix that increasingly feels like a shrill slurry - ‘Separate Missions’, ‘Errors In The History Of God’, the gaudy ‘Witch’s Cup’ and the album’s closer ‘Slurpy Slurpy Sleep Sleep’ come to mind - and while the grooves have some nervy presence, the greater reliance on faded, higher-register vocals don’t help the best of these songs punch. And you wind up wishing this band would punch harder when you drill into the content - this is a band that’s always painted in broad strokes and while their last album was trying to explore the conflation of the personal and political, the lack of specifics kind of left me feeling this album was scrabbling to nail either; and yet this album is being described as more in the thick of things and a little less ‘naive’ along the way. Which in the majority of cases you’d think would result in a lot of bitter disillusionment and sourness that would be an awkward fit for an act like Biffy Clyro, and certainly wouldn’t work when they try to play a song like ‘Denier’ from the perspective of an abuser and it feels wonky as hell… and you’d be right, because man, this album feels significantly uglier than you’d expect where every moment that’s trying to be more earnest is kneecapped by a creeping, misanthropic nihilism that feels really shallow, once again, not helped by this band’s penchant for broad generalities in the writing. And it’s such a bad fit when you have songs like ‘Haru Urara’ and ‘A Hunger In The Haunt’ that are a much more natural fit for this group’s strengths - yes, they try to swing things around to better notes, but the ending can’t sell it and I’m left with the feeling I spent way too much time to get into a thoroughly mediocre follow-up album. 5/10… look, this band has their moments and it sucks that this is the first time I’m reviewing them, especially when their album last year was pretty good - I’d start there.

Parquet Courts - Sympathy For Life - You know, when I was first approaching this album, I was wondering if this would wind up a case of ‘be careful what you wished for’, as a band known for jagged explosive post-punk and indie rock continued to refine down their formula to accentuate their melodic gifts but lose the firepower along the way. But here’s the odd thing: I went back to my review of Wide Awake! with Brian Burton on production and my biggest issue with that album came in the streamlining of the production, so maybe the bigger problem here is that so many of these retro post-punk albums slip into the back of my mind with disturbing ease unless they have those explosive standouts, be they driven on melody, texture, or content. But it looks like Parquet Courts is going in the exact opposite direction with this - no Brian Burton this time, instead bringing in the indie veteran Rodaidh McDonald who has produced a ton of records in the past decade I really liked to make the most flagrant groove-driven Talking Heads homage I’ve heard in a while. Now this is not inherently a bad thing - folks tend to forget that post-punk wasn’t all desaturated gloom and could kill in creating dance floor vibes, and to give Parquet Courts a lot of credit, the basslines and textured percussion have a lot of flavourful bounce to recreate those late 70s vibes - but if you do so at the continued expense of your hooks and explosive punch, especially over extended, increasingly meandering track lengths with increasingly spare mixes, it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re chasing a studied retread of sounds you’ve already heard before…. and this is no Remain In Light. But okay, that art school side of this band’s songwriting has always been a major draw, at least for me, although with every subsequent album, you can tell that Parquet Courts have been approaching a more communal and populist streak. Well, Sympathy For Life has them pushed even further in that direction, where the craving for real connection and to cling to any optimistic framework is pushed damn near to its brink, where he highlights how many of the technologies supposedly designed for our convenience have commodified the human experience and sucked away its lifeblood - and even then it’s more nuanced in trying to examine the balance between a much rougher past and now - and where our protagonist even finds himself questioning the loss of a bad relationship if it means he’s now alone. In a way, it’s an album trying to be its own self-fulfilling prophecy, lay the fertilizer for its own communal experience and vibe - and you know, credit where it’s due if it kind of gets there and I’d probably dance to nearly the entire album… but it ends on a weak note and it just doesn’t have the same impact it could. Solid 7/10, definitely an enjoyable listen, but not their best.

The War On Drugs - I Don’t Live Here Anymore - You know, I had a whole piece prepared for a solo review of this album - and off of the first few listens, I was sure it’d be worth it. Sure, it might wind up short - at this point The War On Drugs have an established and legit fantastic formula and sound and it’s not like they’ve ever been the most lyrical band, so surely it’d be easy to put together, right? Well, here’s the thing: there was a shift with this album, in that a lot of the haze and sheen that permeated their early work and started to clear a bit on A Deeper Understanding, the meandering shoegaze compositions that underscored the krautrock grooves, most of that has been sandblasted away for something cleaner, sharper, and much more immediate, where the synths have even more sparkle and the bite of the electric guitars can almost feel oppressively loud in moments. Now on the one hand this doesn’t have to be a bad thing - the band’s biggest asset has been their gift for melody, so if they’re going to supercharge that this could easily be a jump-on point, and hell, given how everyone worships 80s nostalgia, going for more heavier, booming percussion or drum machines that sound more retro feels like an ideal way to underline that yearning Americana - and more often than not the compositions are anthemic enough to pull it off! But this might be the first time where the cracks in The War On Drugs’ formula are starting to slip through no matter how great the tunes are - it’s an album that was reportedly composed more piecemeal across multiple studios and you can tell, in how the album’s vibe feels more fractured, with more moments that don’t quite blend as well as they could, especially in shoving the vocals closer to the front and leaning on analog synths that don’t always flatter the mix the way they could. But I’m also not sure immediacy is a great fit for The War On Drugs - Adam Granduciel is giving more of an emphatic performance, but he’s always been a frontman comfortable within the mist, whereas a little more exposure highlights his husky limitations as a singer and draws more attention to the writing. And while I said it before that The War On Drugs have never been lyrical, it matters less when you just let the fragmented words ride like echoes on the wind - here you become a lot more aware of the self-flagellating depression, the emotions never quite grasped, the oceans of time and memory and love that roil around us, and just how much of this feels like a pensive, Springsteen-worshipping dad rock cliche. And honestly, I hate having to go to that place to talk about this band - it might be true, but it’s lazy criticism and the formula is so powerful and executed so well that I often reply with ‘who cares’… but when you draw more attention to it all, the seams become more visible. Make no mistake, this is still a great album, I’m giving it a solid 8/10… but it’s a step back from their best, and I’m not sure it helps that I can see a bit more behind the curtain.