Sharptooth

Clever Girl

Pure Noise, 2017

Originally published at Apathy & Exhaustion

You definitely want this reptile on your side at a riot, girl.  The blisteringly angry Sharptooth have tried to send the bitterness of their first album Clever Girl down with a cover and title inspired by the widely-loved popcorn bollocks of Jurassic Park (new sequel, reboot, whatever the shit, coming June 2018).  It’s as if they knew that being a pro-feminist hardcore band with awareness of intersectionality can bring accusations of being humourless or one-dimensional (ironically).  In a perfect example of what prompted their fellow Baltimore hammer-bearers War On Women to pen a song called Youtube Comments, the Pure Noise Records upload for this album is awash in, well, pure noise from stupid fuckers.  It’s starting to seem that in lock with wider society, the punk sphere is becoming an even more degraded vehicle for enlightened viewpoints than the already questionable standard it was at when I was younger.  I expect that any day now Heideroosjes will get back together to perform that crap song off Punk-O-Rama 5 (the European version) at nationalist marches in Warsaw, only this time they’d reword it as SJWPOS.  Putting that horror aside, what exactly do Sharptooth -- in all their metropolitan glory -- bring to what Jeff Goldblum describes as “the plate of dino-entertainment”? 

Their bandcamp self-describes this lot as melodic hardcore.  I suppose that’s true here, but not in any academically useful sense of the term (some of their earlier stuff I can find fits the label, though).  When listening to Clever Girl the band that most comes to my mind is Converge, which gives you an idea of how heavy it gets, if not quite so unwieldy.  The beats per minute on this are often high, the vocals break and shudder in bloodlust, and there’s a manic and stabbing nature to much of the music.  Whenever it slows down, you get the impression it’s just a predator gearing up to attack you again.  Rather than a raptor I found myself picturing a deranged pterodactyl picking apart its victim, although it’s possible I’m getting the flying imagery due to thinking about how brilliant Eagles Become Vultures is.  If The Dusk In Us has got you back in the mood for some metalcore, this could complement it.  If you are furious about fucking everything, this could help.  There are no snowflakes here.

It’s not all like that though.  Even with “proper,” normal track lengths, the lyrics are generally straightforward, like Converge without all the artsy-fartsy poetry.  Opening piece Rude Awakening is the typical ode to finding some sort of comfortable place within the extreme music scene.  During the first minute, singer Lauren Kashan delivers lines in an almost-rapping style that remind me of St. Pete-dwelling emcee Figment.  It’s a strangely compelling intro before Clever Girl gets into the velociraptor-maimed guts of how it will sound.  You’d be forgiven for thinking Fuck You Donald Trump is going to be as subtle as that nice little number by YG and co., but the lyrics admirably don’t even mention him (I’d sure like not to).  Kashan even states in an interview that the title of the song is a joke rather than an attempt to be controversial, being as it's not a particularly fringe view to oppose the prick.  Can I Get A Hell No doesn’t appear to be a Miley Cyrus reference thankfully, but it does borrow some famous lines from Nancy Sinatra.  Jesus Loves You is a good mid-album instrumental, with fittingly sludgey, apocalyptic vibes, but I could have done with more of a thorough spotlight on the instruments.  Flesh it out, so all the dinos get something to eat.  No, I am not calling for more fleshlights in a work of feminist art. 

There can be allegations of box-ticking about tracklists like this.  Given that albums are generally thought collections cut into about a dozen individual slices, you could argue that box-ticking is part of the essence of them.  These just happen to be the issue slices that matter to this band.  Contrary to the average punk or hardcore group, they involve a fair bit of Raging Against the Man-chine (the name of a recently returned blog that I used to read quite a lot).  It’s tempting to get further into this current state of affairs: where social issues seem once again to have risen to the forefront of discussion; where anyone remotely of the left needs to be deeply questioning tactics and narratives that may have contributed to such a backlash against progress. 

But fuck it.  I am tired of not being able to simply enjoy anything because of this online spiritual successor to the “political correctness gone mad!” tabloids.  Not everything is so complex.  On this record, marginalised people demand not to be raped and murdered, and they are as confounded as I am as to why that is controversial.  You can hear it.  The specificity of certain tracks means that the lyrics smack of someone trying to make a simple claim and being frustrated that they need to try infinite new phrasings to get the point across.  And that, in itself, is not a bad way of getting the point across.  That being said, I think an argument could be made that, moving forward, it would be a bit disappointing if Sharptooth didn’t develop the lyrical ideas somehow.  It’s not that what’s here is poor, but on more than one occasion the significant words could have easily fit inside a traditional 90 second hardcore song.  You’ve raged real good, now make the rage a tad deeper, or something. 

Other light-hearted nods are present, bobbing on the surface without undermining the angry messages.  Sharptooth is a Land Before Time reference (if you’re starting to wonder, yes, Kashan is a herpetoculturist -- a bloomin’ alligator trainer).  The cuts Left 4 Dead (presumably named after the zombie game series), Rise and Blood Upon Your Hands are about sexual assault, movement building and mental health respectively.  Coincidence perhaps, but listed together they look like Send More Paramedics levels of zombie inclusion (not a bad musical comparison at times, actually).  It’s no wonder this thing dropped right before Halloween.  The severed half-limb on the cover even brings to mind the artwork of Left 4 Dead.  Their previous Chompers EP includes the track Charmander Vs Squirtle; could we be dealing with the fabled girl gamer here?  Clever indeed, with claws ripping up analogue sticks.

Pushing Forward is a fine anthemic closer that goes back and forth in a few different directions, but still works as a whole.  It’s a pretty decent microcosm for the Clever Girl sound, with red-throat vocals, welcome singing, gravelly spoken word and gang-back ups.  Fittingly given its title, it’s got some of those slightly more intricate lyrics that I was hoping for earlier.  Like the final track on Propagandhi’s recent album, Victory Lap, it’s about breaking free from the current paradigm, and even similarly uses the imagery of two people holding hands as they do so.  With this and Rude Awakening surrounding the rest of the record, Sharptooth appear to be explaining the purpose of their approach on this album.  It's not meant to politely get the point across with a persuasive argument.  It’s a burst of pent-up apoplexy.  The point of Fuck the Border is not to gently appeal to the better nature of ICE agents.  These songs are places of release, and we need to make sure these places remain available options for anyone that might be feeling the crush of our times.  Allowing the culture wars to scare people away would not be particularly clever.

You can stream the whole album from the Pure Noise Bandcamp here.  You can also buy it on CD or raptor-vinyl here.

The Movielife

Cities in Search of a Heart

Rise, 2017

Originally published at Apathy & Exhaustion

Sometimes you find things that you never had any intention of looking for.  New York band The Movielife are such an example for me. Having ignored them during their initial run, they’ve just put out a brand new album, Cities in Search of a Heart, on Rise Records, and it is really rather good.  How exactly had I missed them before? The answer is entertainingly detailed.

At the time of their last release in 2003 my complicated love-hate relationship with the U.S. was in an early stage.  (Also in its early stages was my developing skill of using music reviews to self-discover and express distaste for all that is fucked with the world, a practice with which I am still comfortable.  You think this is about the tunes?) The attack on Iraq threw us all into baffled revulsion at both our own government and the omnipresent “senior partner” across the ocean. Alien and ridiculous as their beliefs appeared, right on our doorstep were examples of cultural encroachment that -- while obviously less urgent a situation than an unprovoked invasion that ruined the lives of millions -- cut deep with a feeling that we were being had, and paying to be had at that.  Even then I also knew however, that, in part due to such Americanisation, you’d have to be a dying breed of ale-soaked, Bernard-Manning-loving Englishman to not admire some aspect of American fare (at least until that brand of ale was bought out by Anheuser-Busch and the proceeds from unsuspecting patrons used to start a new line of “authentic” hard root beers, or some such shite).  

In this context comes the act in question.  “Movie” is an inviting but stupid term, one that I have steadfastly refused to adopt, and thankfully everyone seems to understand the word film without hesitation.  The Movielife therefore was a name that I probably couldn’t separate from cinema-stuffed depictions of spoiled American teenagers acting like dickheads (this whole history works pretty nicely for the not-bad Say Anything as well, regardless of the source materials occasional lefty economics).  Combine that with their release artwork comprised of Hollywood stars, Las Vegas excess-glitz and whitebread suburbia, and I never gave them a second thought.  I may have loved super-American sub-genres like skate punk and Midwest emo, but the line had to be drawn somewhere. Also to be considered is that to be a teenage music fan is to live through a glorious time of discovering more good music from many decades than you can even comprehend.  Only later will you be glad that you missed some stuff.

But I’m now older and wiser, and presumably so are these blokes.  And since packaging still matters, I’m happy to say they made a much better first impression on me this time.  The artwork is very American, but respectably American (photo taken by Jani Zubkovs, bassist of Caspian). The image shows piles of half-processed logs with no one around to finish the job, sitting under a vastly bigger and faintly darkening sky.  It acknowledges some of the contradictions at the core of this nation-state (and others). How can a city be at peace if its continual growth relies on the further destruction of its surroundings? If the heart of the community comes to be based on what is whittled from this daily grinding, and that work goes away due to necessity or resource exhaustion or mere greed, how do we rebuild meaningful lives from that?  These are defining conversations. Nobody right-thinking wants a Dead Industrial Atmosphere.

These various themes are subtly alluded to throughout the album.  The title is a line from “Mercy is Asleep at the Wheel,” the first single.  The lyrics are delivered slow, steadily and purposefully.  When the vocals step back (or get loud at the songs closure), the whistling feedback and dense guitar mix remind of rocky shoegaze act My Vitriol, and some others from the harder edge of UK alternative.  Other than that, the reference points are mostly quintessentially yank - as you might expect, and not bad ones either. What follows is a wide range of comparisons that a) shows the breadth of styles on Cities in Search of a Heart, and b) reveals some of the bands that I was kind enough to give a stinking chance to as a youth.

Most consistently, I found myself thinking of Only Crime.  Singer Vinnie Caruana just sounds like modern era Russ Rankin (also of Good Riddance), and The Movielife seem fans of a good dose of heavy melody.  The most stark example is on the track “Blood Moon,” where the whole trajectory of ups and downs, guitars and vocal inflections, sounds like a Virulence B-side.  Vying for position though are The Ataris and Alkaline Trio, in the sense that the overall tone is one where melancholy vibes meet an upbeat and driven emotional punk rhythm.  “Pour Two Glasses” is a classy piece of string music reminiscent of The Get Up Kids’ On a Wire, if that had been a better album at least.  The opening of “Sister Saint Monica” is nothing if not classic Weezer.  

Despite all this admirable company and my baseless concerns as a youngster, Caruana does have the kind of voice that could easily veer into irking, American-on-a-chalkboard territory (research provided by an old cover of the Descendents’ “Thank You”).  Doubtless tempered by age, his somewhat high, New York delivery is also smoothed out by an echoey vocal mix and instrumental envelopment.  This works marvelously on the likes of “Lake Superior,” which has a broad sound worthy of a stunning natural wonder before it gets chopped to pieces.

While there are a couple of tracks that are clearly romantic (“You’re the Cure,” “Pour Two Glasses”), generally the songs are of the reflective, open-to-interpretation nature.  I don’t imagine everyone will get the same socio-environmental read on Cities as a swamp-dwelling Swampy like me, but there’s a case to be made that it’s there.  “Laugh Ourselves to Death” for example is a brilliant song that ends with its hands in the air in a big, apocalyptic shriek of absurdity.  Lines like “the world is a pile of shit in the summer sun,” and “we’re gonna die exploding in a ball of fire,” come alongside calls for retreating into the comfort of our private lives.  The narrative and anguish made me think of a documentary I recently watched: the philosophical, dramatic and occasionally boldly honest How to Let Go of the World and Love all the Things Climate Can’t Change.  And then it made me think of Network.

Studying this album (searching it, let’s say), I kept coming back to my struggle with the significant conflict between seeking out answers and sinking meaningful roots; between exploring and Euro-centric, entitled destruction.  “You’re the Cure” ends in brief airport lobby tones, where people hug desperately and backpackers take mental notes while partaking in the most extreme and damaging transport that we have devised.  There are a number of these Ataris-style clips throughout the record, small moments of movement and love that are quiet and brief like a humble, light footed traveller. The aforementioned single is a driving metaphor where three trains are neglected in favour of the illusion of control.

I’d like to be permitted a couple more comparisons in order to discuss the incredible closer “Hearts.”  This track is a small epic from the deep, dark American countryside, a heartlands campfire somehow reminiscent of the King Crimson-inspired “M62 Song” by Doves, with sombre guitar and subtle background clinks from Texas is the Reason. “Please don't call it protest, call it humanity,” because we can’t afford to leave anyone out of this conversation.  This band from the North American London (zoo) clearly have been looking far and wide for the heart they desire. The album ends with the sound of a door opening and a person going inside. Maybe going home, having found something that resembles one.

I may have been unfair to the band’s book cover appearance all these years [gee, ya think?].  Their 2003 record was called Forty Hour Train Back to Penn; their artwork might have been a bit gaudily shit, but it indicated a physical search; the “moving” life.  If high-speed, long distance travel has its demographic constrictions and problems, we’re lucky that movies and music can be amazingly informative devices when they reach for the heart of the matter.  With an efficient and clean ten tracks The Movielife have converted me into a fan. While I am still currently wary of giving their old material a try, I could conclude that the younger me, righteous as he was in many things, was also misguided.  It’s nice to be surprised. Perhaps especially by Americans.

The band has a UK tour in November: https://twitter.com/BrandonReilly/status/920987221339058176

You can hear Cities in Search of a Heart here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzoeX0jBht0&list=PLKcGEIO7V0rUDm2KJnTgPKSpN9IdKyOY5