Stick To Your Guns
Keep Planting Flowers
As victims of their own nominative determinism, a new Stick To Your Guns album comes bearing no surprises. Here they are, once again trying to reverse-engineer the breakthrough that Diamond gave them, just like they have with every album since 2012. To be fair to them, it’s really only on a conscious revisit that you notice how heavy a blow to them that actually is. On a normal release schedule, they seem like a strong hardcore band, even sometimes a great one. When you’re shotgunning their albums one after another, however…yeah, that’s significantly less exhilarating. But with Keep Planting Flowers, it’s become more and more difficult to separate those two scenarios. Stick To Your Guns still haven’t changed, but this feels a lot less impressive on its face. Pile on the context and a release date firmly in the early-January doldrums, and it’s like Keep Planting Flowers is actively flaunting how much of a puff of smoke it is.
You almost feel like familiarity with Stick To Your Guns’ past work doesn’t even matter, as Keep Planting Flowers hardly excels as an entry point to something more. Perhaps the objective was to cut back for a leaner assault, though it’s debatable what that amounts to. The particular guitar firmness and rhythmic step of the vocal delivery bring to mind Beartooth a lot, as what’s probably seen as the best shorthand for the self-proclaimed “simplest and purest form of expression”. And it’s not as if songs like Permanent Dark and Severed Forever are that bad in that vein. The problem is the way it feels so canned and gated, and unable to grow into anything beyond what this already is. It leaves the spacious, emotive balladry of the title track as a profoundly awkward speedbump, or guest spots from Terror’s Scott Vogel and SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s Connie Sgarbossa to be swallowed up and digested.
All of that leaves Stick To Your Guns fighting for a performance that it’s hard to be all that impressed by. Not in the sense that they’re without passion or intensity, because that isn’t true. Jesse Barnett still has a hell of a shout on him, which may be the one aspect improved through consistent repetition. Much of the rest, meanwhile, isn’t as lucky. You can certainly carp at the minor stuff within that, like how they’re still stitching vocal clips in on Permanent Dark and Eats Me Up to little meaningful effect. Mostly, though, Keep Planting Flowers is just such a blasé approximation of what it’s supposed to be. Sure, there’s anger felt and strikes taken as a result, but would it hurt to actually give it some welly? For as strong as they appear, there’s little in Stick To Your Guns’ repertoire these days that does more than glance, like how the most generous crumbs of political firepower are in Spineless and Who Needs Who, and are still too broad to matter.
It’s a little disappointing on an album whose art is reminiscent of certain bits of anti-war imagery, which you’d hope to represent a depth of commentary that just isn’t here. That cover is further evocative of Banksy’s Gas Mask Girl, a piece designed to symbolise how imperative the vocal autonomy of the individual is. Quite ironic, then, that Stick To Your Guns seldom sound like they’re saying anything of their own, or doing much befitting of a band nestling on a two-decade career. ‘Complacent’ is the wrong word, but so is any sentiment that suggests Keep Planting Flowers to be even somewhat of a step forward for its creators. It churns ahead, deep in routine hemming its boundaries in all the more. Is the sound of digging that bookends the album supposed to be self-aware, then? Do Stick To Your Guns know they’re willfully precluding themselves of any potential for innovation?
For fans of: Beartooth, Stray From The Path, The Ghost Inside
‘Keep Planting Flowers’ by Stick To Your Guns is released on 10th January on Sharptone Records.
PATRIARKH
Prophet Ilja
Remember when black-metal feuds used to end in violent death? Normal people (i.e. not traditional black-metal fans) might call it progress that they don’t anymore. Now it’s pettiness like this, which at least makes the rubbernecking easier to find some fun in. Here’s a band once called Batushka who spun out of another band called Batushka, and continued to use the name out of spite until some legal rigmarole got in their way. Up to that point, you had two bands with the exact same name, both stylising themselves and their album nomenclature in Cyrillic, and both rooting themselves in religious orthodoxy and liturgies subverted in an exceptionally black-metal way. Even now, it’s not like ‘patriarch’ is too different in spirit from ‘batushka’ as the equivalent to a religious ‘Father’.
The attempt to curve legal ramifications into another bout of one-upsmanship at least has a modicum of taste about it. As the first true PATRIARKH album, Prophet Ilja feels designed with reappraisal in mind, with a richer, more resplendent form of black-metal to couch the story of an illiterate Polish peasant and the sect he led during the ‘30s and ‘40s. It’s a taste of Eastern European quasi-mysticism that’s entirely in PATRIARKH’s palette, made deliberately listenable and ear-catching by black-metal standards. It hardly matters if you, too, have ear-holes ignorant to anything but the English language, when the enthralling chants and choirs and framing via a gruff, brimstone-hewn narrator do so well at building an atmosphere. A similar boon comes from black-metal production that doesn’t sound as though it was provided by a literal troglodyte, to help with the opulence of orchestral arrangements and rustic European folk dirges.
It’s probably worth mentioning that Prophet Ilja feels designed as more of a continuous piece than a collection of strict songs. It’s why, in general PATRIARKH fashion, tracks don’t have specific names, instead just Wierszalin followed by their corresponding numeral. Therefore, the reliance on flow is effectively make-or-break. It’s another reason why it probably wouldn’t be too bad an idea to scale back on more typical blastbeat-laden fare than they already have. They just aren’t where PATRIARKH bring their best; opt more exclusively for folk-metal or even dark-folk, and that’d work much better. It’s just fortunate, then, that that’s where Prophet Ilja finds itself most of the time. In emphasising the encroach of the occult and the nocturnal rather than stopping inside to play up an intensity, there’s a whole lot more to be drawn in by and invested from.
It’s the way you get the most from black-metal, honestly, at least nowadays. The old, icy, underdeveloped visage of ‘evil’ is about as prehistoric as it’s always sounded, and it’s a net positive to have bands like PATRIARKH taking heed of that. The purists may scoff (at it seems as though they do, especially ones still holding a candle for Current Batushka), but there’s a wealth to how Prophet Ilja feels to listen to and experience. Bear in mind that this is a band who’ve essentially been borne from and moulded by the enmity towards their past collaborators. Under those circumstances, making some of the most listenable black-metal out there is quite the achievement.
For fans of: Watain, Wardruna, Mgła
‘Prophet Ilja’ by PATRIARKH is out now on Napalm Records.
Day By Day
Dust And Ashes
The first thing that may catch your eye here is the Flatspot signing, which is normally a trustworthy sign. It almost doesn’t matter that the band in question has done sweet FA since their 2018 debut, most notable for its singer’s sharper moments sounding like he’s drawing his final breaths. If Flatspot are involved, that’s good enough, right? Well, it turns out that even hardcore’s premier pixie dust merchants aren’t infallible. That’s not to say that Day By Day are awful, but they’ve not wandered into the pasture fully formed, as plenty of their contemporaries did. Thus, they do currently lag a ways behind on a roster famous for cracking hardcore’s bottleneck and letting future scene leaders pour on out.
It’s a simple stylistic level where Day By Day find themselves predominantly falling back. Among a field of limber, curb-stomping bruisers, there’s already a buildup of attrition when their own output is so rigid and resistant. It isn’t as naturally kinetic or electric in the way it moves; when there is something snappier on Fakes & Liars II, it’s no great shock that it works. For most of Dust And Ashes, though, there’s a struggle to engage or move. It’s too staid in pace to click into a low-end groove like a lot of metallic hardcore, and the desire to splay out in domineering black sludge on a track like The Poison isn’t testing the walls erected by a more typical hardcore rubric. It’s a strange approach, and one that Day By Day erroneously seem to believe is what gives them their firepower.
Honestly, if it weren’t for how uncharitable said approach can be, there’d be enough within Day By Day to work as a ‘regular’ hardcore band. They’re suitably heavy and carry a dark, dense production style to accentuate that. Moreover, Ian Dolan has been revamped as a vocalist to now bring a well of tension rather than tentativeness, with additions from Jared Hutcherson and Joey Collery to lend extra muscle (even if it’s not quite the three-headed assault it’s been pegged as). The passion in mere performance is evident, and has often been cited as one of Day By Day’s core tenets. It’s what Dust And Ashes shows off best, really, particularly when the chance to cut loose arises and Peace Or Annihilation? becomes a more idiosyncratic, experimental track than a 46-second runtime would allude to.
Those positive flecks and directions are the most compelling parts of Day By Day, without question. As of now, applied in smaller capacity, the band find themselves buckling under the strain of limited output to show it off, further tied back by how long the gap between releases has been. The good thing is that they’re now in the best environment possible to cultivate what works for them and maybe even catch up with their labelmates’ head start, if they’re lucky. The future is definitely wide open, even if the present can seem anything but. Perhaps this isn’t Flatspot breaking ground with an outright failure, then, but a work in progress. Can’t let them get too complacent, now, can we?
For fans of: Boundaries, END, Dying Wish
‘Dust And Ashes’ by Day By Day is released on 17th January on Flatspot Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
