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Daughters, "Hell Songs"
Nobody will ever convince me that the best musicians make the best music. Case in point is the newest from Daughters, a quintet of unhinged talent practically bursting at the seams with ideas, but incapable of stringing them all together in a satisfying way. There are some truly exquisite moments of furious cacophony on Hell Songs, but they're all fleeting and call the album's already brief running time into question.
Hydra Head
The 10 songs that make up this splattered album only clock in at 23 minutes and some change. The songs are quick bursts of dramatic vocals, completely damaged guitars, and drums that rumble more than they keep time. Songs sort of stumble out of the gates and from there become increasingly brazen, almost drunk in their movements, and with one exception they're brief and finish as quickly as they begin. The problem arises when it quickly becomes evident that there's nothing for me to hang onto from song to song. This might as well be one long album of sonic connect the dots, but with a twist: in order to play it's necessary to try and keep up with the band's narcotic imagination. This is competitive connect the dots with a bunch of wolverines that have been fed dangerous amounts of PCP.
The band's attack is fierce, but often goofy. The doodling guitars illicit circus-like imagery, the vocalist brings to mind a strange admixture of Elvis and a carney whose side show ends with pornographic encores featuring the bearded lady and a tub of vaseline, and some of the effects sound like they belong on a record by The Locust. It's all fun and games, but fun and games that are quickly forgotten. Almost as quickly as the band ends some of its songs, I forget about them. I can recall phrases of strangeness that I like to try and imitate with my mouth and laugh about afterwards, but I can't pin them to a song or to an idea. The only lyric that sticks out in my mind is the opening line, "I've been called a sinner, wrongdoer, evil doer..." and I love how off kilter it sounds, but the sloppiness the band employs on one song is severely modified on the next track, to a point where I feel like many of these songs may not even belong together.
Despite the brevity of some of these tracks, many of them could be edited down even further. "Providence by Gaslight" has two or three wonderful sections to it that come immediately to mind and, in fact, it's one of the only songs that sticks out in my mind. Running just under the two minute mark, there's probably a solid 45 seconds of nonsense that could be cut out. Not only would it give the music a more immediate flavor, it'd cut away the messy stuff that sounds like filler for the rest of the song. It's as though the band asked themselves, "how can we get from point A to point B without actually connecting the two parts together?" Other songs suffer the same problem, but at least "Providence by Gaslight" has a melody and a rhythm section that are memorable. Maybe other musicians will appreciate this more than I can, but as it stands this is showy technical metal that never escapes its technical side.
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