Architects - The Here And Now

Of all the types of review there are, none is more difficult than that of the "new sound album". It makes the review become less about the quality of the album and more about questions the listener must answer. What is more important, the quality of an album or the duty of fulfilling expectations? Is it right that an album be measured against its predecessors, or that quality, or lack thereof? Because believe me, your opinion of the new Architects release will depend entirely upon your expectations of it going in. There is, simply put, nothing of the band who wrote Ruin in this album. Even the decidedly more metalcore-influenced Hollow Crown was undoubtedly an Architects album. The Here and Now is not. Indeed, it’s very self-awarely so, the album title seeming to specifically reference the band’s desire to have it heard on its own merits, something that would be much easier were it not stuck in the canon of one of the UK’s best young bands.

Architects’ rise to fame has been a hard one. Despite early tours with fashion icons/sometimes-musicians Bring Me The Horizon, their acceptance by the emerging demographic of metal-aware scene kids was much slower than that of their compatriots, despite their exceptionally tight mathcore chops. The loss of original vocalist Matt Johnson and acquisition of the much more charismatic Sam Carter was just in time for the more accomplished Ruin, which introduced to their formula much more experimental territory, retaining the jagged complexity and backing it up with imaginative sensibilities reminiscent of Isis and Cult of Luna. The follow-up, Hollow Crown, had a much lighter feel to it, exploring both the melodic and ambient abilities of the musical section and Carter’s clean singing abilities. They’re particularly notable for each album being different, but up until now they’ve always been defined by a common Architects-ness, sharing common traits; the quick dissonant chords, the sludgy low end and the exemplary instrumental work, as well as some of the most innovative and interesting songwriting in modern metal. This is why it’s going to be very frustrating that this album seems to be such a dividing line in their career. None of those things are especially evident in this album, though they’re there in very small doses. This is an Architects album in name and personnel only, and let’s get one thing straight, I for one never listened to Architects for their smiles. I listened to them because something about their music resonated with me, and whether or not the new album has something of its own to offer, that Special Architects Something simply isn’t there in this album.

Right, shorn of those preconceptions, is The Here and Now good? To be honest, it’s entirely average. Standard. Utterly unable to stand out from all the other alternative albums out there. There’s nothing about it which grabs the listener, no recognizable reason to care about it in the slightest. Maybe this is them being nice to all the other young bands on the global metal scene by not putting out a record that the rest have to work their arses off catching up with. If it weren’t for the Architects name already being established, no-one would be talking about it. Every song is that frustrating okay, without any flair or drama, and the performances and songwriting are without any particular distinction. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s plain, unmemorable and ultimately without any of the gravitas which defined Follow The Water or You’ll Find Safety. For what it’s worth, it’s easily the worst thing Greg Puciato or Andrew Neufield have ever been involved with, poor sods that they are. I’ve repeatedly heard comparisons to Alexisonfire, for its straightforward, driving melodies and harsh vocal-clean vocal alternation, but that comparison is giving far too little credit to the complexity and intelligence that Alexisonfire display in their music. And, to give them credit, at least when Alexisonfire did a new sound album its failure as an Alexisonfire release was balanced out by its genuinely being a great album, justifying its lack of the band’s previous hallmarks with a host of equally well-executed new ideas. Architects now sound like the bands that popped up in the mid- 2000s which were trying so hard to be Alexisonfire, but just didn’t have the musical aptitude. Either way, I think they sound much more like a sub-par and mildly hardcore-influenced 36 Crazyfists, but that’s just me.

As an album, it’s vacuous and lacking impact, but as an Architects release, it stands within a canon of truly brilliant albums which The Here and Now seems to me to fail to live up to. With this established, what worries me is what happens next. This shift seems dramatic, but not prompted by anything other than where the musicians wanted to go, and that sucks because they’re unlikely to want to go back. And while that’s admirable, and something I have tremendous respect for, and fuck it, it’s not like the old albums are going anywhere, and yes, I’ll go to their shows and sing along to the songs I love, but I’m slightly sad that we’re not getting another album by the version of Architects that influenced me as much as they did as songwriters, and that I enjoyed so very much.

P.S. Holy shit, the new Radiohead is amazing, and I have no idea how much more I’ll appreciate it once I’ve had time to properly take it all in.

P.P.S.: The last three weeks or so's 1AAD, and I think a few others I've listened to, have been, in no particular order:
The Decemberists - The King is Dead (Folk-ish Indie)
Isis - In Absence of Truth (Post-Metal)
Dead Hearts - Bitter Verses (Hardcore)
The Middle East - The Recordings of the Middle East (Folk-ish Indie)
Have A Nice Life - Deathconsciousness (Devoted about four days to that one! One of my absolute favourite albums) (Shoegaze/Drone/Post-Punk)
Converge - Jane Doe (Mathcore)
Burial - Untrue (Really arty Dubstep)
Portishead - Dummy (Trip-Hop)
Russian Circles - Geneva (Post-Rock/Instrumental Progressive Rock)
Slayer - Reign In Blood (Thrash Metal)
Immolation - Close To A World Below (Death Metal)
Anaal Nathrakh - Eschaton (Blackened Grindcore)
More Than Life - Love Let Me Go (Hardcore)
Deathspell Omega - Paracletus (Experimental Black Metal)
Opeth - Blackwater Park (Progressive Death Metal)
Orchid - Dance Tonight! Revolution Tomorrow! (Screamo)
Alexisonfire - Watch Out! (Post-Hardcore)

Dead Swans - Sleepwalkers

Thanks to my new metal mag of choice, Terrorizer, and I say "thanks" in the same way that a child says "thanks" to the grandma that made him a sweatshirt of industrial twine and razorblades for Christmas, I've become aware of the blog Metal Inquisition, which attempts to refine the medium of music snarkery to an art form, and at this point I'd like to say that I DEFINATELY HAD NEVER READ IT BEFORE THIS BLOG WAS STARTED. It's an entertaining read because beneath the complete contempt for justified opinions and constant gushing over obscure-to-unimportant '80s thrash, the entire blog is essentially a portrait of Sergeant D, the world's saddest man, his contempt for the world and triggered double kick drums a mere cover for his desire for people to value him. I have an image in my mind of a fat guy in a Devourment t-shirt hunched over his keyboard, tears streaming down his face as he types hatespeech with one hand, his other jammed down the front of his shorts as he sweatily masturbates to the MySpace photos of the fifteen year-old scene girls that fawn over BrokeNCYDE.

It suddenly occurred to me that this may well be me in twenty years time.

"No!" I said to myself, proudly holding my 50/50 good-bad ratio aloft like lion cubs in a Disney movie, "Cynicism has yet to take me! And also, no thanks, fifteen year-old girls!” I then spent a day in Brighton with a group of friends criticising everything they like, see and are. Maybe I was right the first time. Eventually one of them actually screamed at me, "Is there anything you like?!?" and confronted with the challenge that I am in fact incapable of feeling love, I actually had to think for a moment. I love webcomics, and gameboy music, and also my friends, I guess, but whatever. But yes, I'm a changed man, and I'd like to talk about something I love.

I have officially listened to "Thinking of You", the first track off Dead Swans' new album "Sleepwalkers" more times on my current iTunes library than any other song. I may well love it more than any other song on there. It is what Dead Swans are; a highly concentrated, utterly refined explosion of everything that makes hardcore great. Imagine the hyperactive hardcore punk offered up by This Is Hell combined with the intensity and brooding textural elements of The Hope Conspiracy. We're talking thoughtful, dissonant guitar soundscapes that burst into racing, soaring melody. We're talking vocals spat from the pit of the soul and roared at an imagined crowd screaming every word back. We're talking that crash-snare-crash-snare drum pattern that anywhere else would be oversimplified but in hardcore works because dammit the important thing is that they're hitting the drums really fucking hard because that means they care or something. Every hardcore trope they use, they play totally straight because if they didn't mean every second of it, it wouldn't be nearly as brilliant.

Anyway, if you could understand any part of that torrent of praise, it's that Dead Swans mean every note of the album, and considering that the last band I reviewed, I declared had no souls, this is an improvement. Yes, they just play very fast punk with a guy shouting over it, but how they do it is the sign of how superb they are. It helps that these guys have very personal lyrics, which lend the a huge amount of emotion to the performances - plus it's a great change from the usual hardcore thing of singing incessantly about HEART and PASSION and about how YOU'LL NEVER BRING US DOWN like they're hosting a fucking pep rally. Many years ago Ian MacKaye denounced the term "emotional hardcore" by pointing out that hardcore was always emotional. This was what he meant all along. Vocalist Nick Worthington possesses a superb hardcore shout packed with conviction and purpose, and the obligatory gang-vocal parts are natural and exhilarating, which is good because this album does what all the great hardcore albums do – it doesn’t prepare you for the live performance. This feels like a live performance. The captivating, energising power of this album carries the force of a real band, like the Brighton crew are actually trapped inside your speakers and that’s why they’re screaming. The guitars gracefully shift from sludgy ambient sections to fast, exhilarating riffs, and the dual guitar lines use dark, powerful harmonies to create a perfect atmosphere from start to finish. They also manage to avoid that weird obsession with oceanic and nautical imagery that most young UK bands are so into, which is nice.

"Sleepwalkers" is one of those albums that every genre has that doesn't do anything new, but does everything so well that it still seems like a novelty. It's certainly the best hardcore album any UK band has ever produced, but considering the UK hardcore scene is about three years old, that's not saying much, so let me make a bigger statement. Best hardcore release of the year. Oh, go on. Best hardcore release since This Is Hell's last one.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

P.S. I can also confirm, as of 18/12/09, that this band FUCKING RULES live. All the heart-wrenching emotion of the album is replaced with astonishing fury, and the impact of the crowd favourites whipped the crowd into a mad frenzy. A great show.