Daughters
You Won’t Get What You Want
Ipecac/Liberator
Daughters’ new album You Won’t Get What You Want is not for the fainthearted. The the four piece noise rock band from Rhode Island’s fourth album (and first in eight years) is as intense, manic and stirring as it is intriguing. Rigid waves of fuzz and whirling clusters of noise are accompanied by overtly patient and spacious drums, and layer upon layer of differing intensities and ripples of sounds. All with Alexis Marshall delivering subconscious train of thought-type lyrics that sail above the sea of sound, before crashing through with deranged yelps and snarls. With lines like “cities of empty glass” being repeated over and over again, the album plays out like some kind of sermon or ritual, or even mind control.
You Won’t Get What You Want often sounds more like an artistic and literary experiment rather than an album made for listening pleasure. It blurs the lines between what is music and what is artistic noise and orchestration, with songs bleeding into one another seamlessly and making for what feels like a 48 minute song, rather than 10 separate songs. The stitch between them all is Marshall’s vocals, full of anger and protest; it ranges from deep baritone droning to a howling and wailing and death growl.
In You Won’t Get What You Want, Daughters have focused on creating art and pushing their musical boundaries. They are conscious, however, to make sure the album is still listenable and it does pull the listener’s ear over and over again thanks to it’s calculated and structured order of chaos as well as the range of textures, changes and energy.
You Won’t Get What You Want is definitely a mood album and it won’t be for everyone (or most people), but for those who are willing to get under its skin and see how it ticks, it will repay your time invested. By the same token, for those that have a Swans shaped hole in their heart, You Won’t Get What You Want will fill it and then some. From the lyrical clarity of lines like “everybody climbs up high then falls real far” in City Song, to Satan In the Wait and Daughter that build into aggressive, out of control exorcism type fervor, both individual tracks and the album as a whole can leave you both exhilarated and a little exhausted. There’s brutish hardcore punk energy and Psycho-like feels of tracks The Flammable Man and Long Road, No Turns; more melodic, but no less dark and experimental tracks in The Reason They Hate Me and Less Sex. Despite its niche style, it’s still diverse, offering up serves of grindcore, hardcore, industrial, post-punk and noise rock. Although at times it is dark and confronting, unpleasant even, it is also always transportative and captivating.
For a group that has come back together after eight years apart, it doesn’t sound much like a reunion album. With its directional and conceptual sounds, it sounds like a band who has been making music together continuously for a long time, albeit that the songs are longer this time around. Perhaps the time apart and individual growth outside of Daughters has given the group a renewed passion to create and move their sound, resulting in such a progressive album. The specks of a reunion may also be visible in the angry energy, with some reports indicating it is not exactly an amicable one. You Won’t Get What You Want is full of violence and vitriol, to whom that is explicitly directed, who knows, perhaps each other? Or perhaps at the perpetual motion of ageing and the aggregate cynicism and ennui that can comes with that.
The album, in all its anger and anti-commercial glory, almost dares the listener to listen on, at times, teetering on the edge of leaving fans feeling completely overwhelmed, but it always steps back just in time to allow some breathing space.
Most importantly however, You Won’t Get What You Want is the kind of album that will inspire and effect other musicians and creatives, helping to shift and progress music and the arts – it’s creatively that pure. And in this modern world where we are constantly drowned in content, this is truly an amazing achievement.
LARA FOX
