I’m going to try to rush and finish this article by the time the Daughters album finishes. Okay so here we go. First off it’s really fast … um, what else? It makes me feel like I’m on speed. I kind of get dizzy, or at least think about being dizzy.
Oh! I think we’re done with two or three songs already, I lost count. It seems that the drumming is really fast-paced, which doesn’t necessarily mean good or incredible but they sure don’t leave us enough room to contemplate it. Overstatement seems to be the name of the game … It’s pure aggression uninhibited and raw … the disjointed guitars … Damn it! Track five already.
Scratch that idea.
How does a consumer approach an album that guarantees to run them about a buck per minute? A friend from Fiji could play the same listener the album 20 or so times over the phone at a better rate than buying the 10-song, 10-dollar, 11-minute album.
“Those had better be the best 11 minutes of my entire week,” says a weary new owner of Daughters’ “Canada Songs.”
The hotly anticipated new Daughters full-length album does indeed accomplish a lot in those precious 11 minutes. Whether the net worth is justified remains to be seen. Like fellow noise-rockers Liars, Daughters is one of those anomalies whose grating musical sound is suitably titled with an absence of the word ‘the,’ leaving frustrated review editors to grind their teeth as the grammatical mishaps abound.
Daughters would like nothing better than to instigate that grind, as that is the name of the genre from which it was spurned. Grind emerged from overseas in the late 1980’s as a safer alternative to hitting yourself in the face with a hammer.
It took the fluttered feedback frenzy of no-wave with the aggravated contempt of industrial noise and layered it atop speed metal. Lyric sheets often provided eloquent insight into the temper tantrums, but the overall incomprehensibility of the vocals made them unnecessary. When Napalm Death began churning out albums, they set the standard for heavy melodic music. In comparison, Slayer was transformed into Poison and Black Sabbath eroded into Kenny Loggins (and Jethro Tull still wasn’t metal). Heavy music was dead.
However, in the spirit of one of the genre’s most beloved topics, necrophilia, grindcore continued humping out agitated scowls. Then sometime in the 21st century, it almost became relevant again. Mathematicians like the Dillinger Escape Plan got into the game, making the frantic dirges John Zorn embraced once again acceptable for jazz fans. The Locust chainsawed its way in from San Francisco, trucking pal Kid606’s penchant for playful, thoughtful song titling like “A Nice Tranquil Thumb (In Mouth).”
Daughters belongs in the same family as The Locust. It weaves similarly intricate webs of brief noise and employs the same maniacal humor to its creations. Daughters is only missing one crucial element that separated The Locust from the lots of hording screechers – moog synthesizer. As a result, Daughters has to try 10 times harder.
Try. Oh lord, does Daughters try. With song titles like “I slept with the Daughters and all I got was this lousy song written about me” and “Pants, Meet Shit,” Daughters certainly isn’t your father’s heavy music. That’s not to say that this is a stupid band with a stupid name singing stupid songs with stupid titles, like “Anal C**t” for example. The band’s grade school musings must be justly weighed with the lyrics to these actual songs. Once listeners delve deep into the heart of the album, it becomes clear that “Canada Songs” is an open forum on postmodernism.
Just look at the title. None of the tracks contained on “Canada Songs” are even remotely related to that maple-syrup guzzling nation up north. The titles allude to possible themes of the various pieces, but sometimes require heavy meditation to establish connections. Instead, the listener is treated to the darker side of absurdity. “They shaved off fourteen points for ugly/ they dumbed down the structure like some amputee” reads one set of lyrics from “I don’t give a shit about wood, I’m not a chemist.”
One could certainly make the case that grind was the appropriate avenue to convey one’s opinions regarding postmodern thought. The words are literally useless symbols, since they are screamed in unintelligible spurts of calculated intensity. The lyrics sheets, while fascinating, are futile for one trying to follow along. I’m pretty sure that most of the time the vocalist (who, like the rest of Daughters, is not named in the liner notes, their website, or their interviews) is not even singing the written lyrics most of the time.
“Fur Beach” starts off the album in a dizzying and maniacal fury that evokes images of the most violent washing machine cycle in the history of mankind. The second tune “Jones from Indiana” does not let up for a second (or in Daughters time, a fourth of a second). It smacks your face up and down with no-wave guitars bending every which wrong way towards aharmonic perfection while that unknown vocalist busts out some fuzz effects to counteract the screaming fits.
It is hard to describe what goes on in a Daughters song because, for the most part, its gone before you even heard it happen. In a sense, the songs win you over with this confusion. There’s little you can do after the draining tension mounts to a head, but savor that one-second pause before the next track and say to yourself, ‘I don’t know what the hell just happened, but it kicked my butt.’ In the end, price margins may seem as absurd as the lyrics to “Nurse, would you please prep the patient for sexual doctor,” but these are a terrific eleven minutes. And I don’t think I could stand a twelfth minute.
