Monday, October 19, 2015

Every Time I Die - Gutter Phenomenon




            If I am notorious for anything, it is most likely procrastinating for untold amounts of time before following through on people’s recommendations. Just like with Modest Mouse, for years, the name Every Time I Die was tossed relentlessly in my direction. Countless conversations ended with promises of “I’ll look them up when I get home,” shortly followed by apparent memory loss on my part. It wasn’t until my girlfriend’s tattoo artist spent an entire session shuffling their discography that I actually got to hear Every Time I Die, but by the end of that hour, I knew I had to delve deeper. With only a few days’ hesitation, I grabbed a copy of Gutter Phenomenon and popped it into my car, to find I understood this act exactly as much as everyone told me I would. 
            With a band name as ostensibly metal as Every Time I Die, music that showcases intensity is an absolute must, and these five musicians do not disappoint. Guitarists Jordan Buckley and Andrew Williams race through heavy melodies and distorted chord progressions, smashing metal grittiness together with rock’n’roll feels that call to mind acts like Black Sabbath and Motörhead.[1] As Jordan reveals in an interview with PureGrainAudio, the band’s infatuation with their rock forefathers is thorough, so much so that the album’s name is a callback to the genre’s beginnings, when the public saw rock as music made “just for losers” that “appealed to the lowest of the low.”[2]


            The chugging and squealing guitars may dominate the mix, but only because drummer Ratboy and bassist Kevin Falk (a Between the Buried & Me alumnus)[3] create a searing rhythmic foundation. On Gutter Phenomenon, Every Time I Die rips through hardcore punk tempos like they only have seconds left to live, attacking each note so thoroughly that you can practically hear the blisters forming on their fingers. Attach to this madness the piercing vocals of Keith Buckley, who grows like a possessed lion into his microphone, and the result is an almost sickeningly heavy sound that shatters the eardrums.              Without doubt, the music on Gutter Phenomenon writhes around like a serpent with its head cut off. The instrumentation is dripping with energy, a fact partially driven by the composition of the music. According to Jordan, the band strives to write riffs that are “not catchier, but harder to forget.”[4] The band explores pretty complex territory, swimming in syncopation during “Pretty Dirty” and messing with time signatures in “Bored Stiff,” yet they manage to rip through each piece with absolute intensity. As Jordan puts it, the band’s philosophy is simple: “We’re going to be playing these songs every day…so let’s write songs we’re never gonna get sick of playing.”[5] Every Time I Die commits fully to making music they truly care about, and while much of their songs tread the same worn metalcore territory almost ad nauseum, they load their performances with fury, fun, and true honesty.
            Although Gutter Phenomenon has its fair share of break downs, screeching minor second chords, and guttural screaming, Every Time I Die manages to break up the monotony of a genre running dry by leaning on older influences. Much of their guitar riffs are built around pentatonic and blues scales that call back to the days of Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, and no song captures more rock’n’roll than “The New Black.” Instead of chugs, the instrumentation revolves around a wild guitar riff reminiscent of rock’s heyday. Both guitarists squeeze in trebly solos, and Ratboy even tastefully applies a cowbell. Similarly, Keith Buckley focuses on singing far more than screaming, and although his voice isn’t the most controlled, he really lays into his catchy chorus lines: “Everything I do is wrong / But by God I do it right.”[6] With “The New Black,” Every Time I Die takes the feel of 70’s rock music and applies a tasteful coat of contemporary metal to the finish, calling back to the greats while maintaining the band’s own signature grittiness.


            The package that Every Time I Die presents is very tight and thorough, but remarkably, one of their greatest strengths is also their weakest link. Lead singer and lyricist Keith Buckley perfectly embodies the metal frontman, and his screaming voice is full and dark, as if he has demons raging in his lungs. But where his heavy vocals reign, his singing voice is severely lacking, and he applies it far too often for its own good. As his melodic parts in “Guitarredand Feathered” and “Apocalypse Now and Then” show, he has an exceedingly hard time staying on pitch, and thus invites more wincing than applause.
            In a similar vein, Keith has a wonderful grasp on creating compelling images and applying poetic principles to his lyrics, but the myriad random scene changes in each song leave the overall pieces completely disjointed. With lines like “We drew a crowd / The crowd drew blood” from “Champing at the Bit,” it is obvious that Keith can wield his pen thoughtfully, but in the same song he jumps between completely unrelated images, moving from “the tide is swelling and we’ve fallen asleep on the shore” to “someone’s yelling fire in the theater.”[7]


            Although Keith’s overload of disconnected images leaves a lot of Gutter Phenomenon feeling unevolved, in “L’Astronaut,” he actually manages to impart a larger theme through the song. Amid changing time signatures and grindcore guitar, Keith paints a scene of a decorated soldier returning from war. His first lines depict the hero’s praise in a safe return, to which he replies humbly: “Honestly, it was nothing / We should all just thank God I’m alive.” Keith then dives beneath this modest façade, digging into the quiet trauma of PTSD; with lines like “I’ve got a 21 gun salute playing over and over and over in my head” and “I’m on call to be somewhere / Somewhere I’m not,”[8] Keith graciously hints at the permanent mental scars so many veterans carry with them long after the fight is over. In his own fragmented manner, Keith effectively describes a hero’s return to his country while taking into consideration the damage war can do to a soldier, turning “L’Astronaut” into a deft treatment of a narrative that has been all-too-familiar for the past decade.


            After spinning Gutter Phenomenon for the past two months, I am pleased to state that the music of Every Time I Die is everything they said it would be. Their riffs rock hard and heavy in a way most metal no longer dares, and their unbridled energetic performance is as infectious as influenza. But most potent in their music is the band’s honesty—each guttural scream and snare smash drips with a truth that is wholly Every Time I Die. Gutter Phenomenon captures the genuine imprint of these five musicians, humming a tone of honesty that rings above all else, and in my opinion, that alone makes this record worth experiencing. 


Tunes to Check Out:
1) Gloom and How It Gets That Way
2) L'Astronaut
3) Tusk and Temper

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