Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want

Along my early journey through heavy metal, Daughters were one of those fringe-as-fuck bands I came across in my venture into The Dillinger Escape Plan’s territory, having heard a lot of great things about them. They were one of those bands I definitely didn’t understand the appeal of the first time I listened to them, but then a year passed and I revisited their material thinking I might have a mind more capable of understanding the hype. Nope, after a second chance and a greater confidence in my judgement, I determined that Daughters was an over-hyped ego project for snobs to point to in order to feel superior to other listeners, reinforced by the pretentious vibe the band somewhat intentionally cultivated. That was in high school though, and of course what grand sage of wisdom is at their most insightful at the all-knowing age of 16? Not me. After about 3 years or so, I gave Daughters another shot, and it didn’t click immediately, but it did eventually, and their weird, but deeply introspective and philosophical appeal through unsympathetic noisy structures and ever-changing explosive mathcore riffing began to make more sense to me.

Bringing some of the most ambitious and artistically honest noise rock and mathcore for the previous decade, Daughters’ mere 62 minute’s worth of LP material preceding this album has left a firm impression on the scene from which they were birthed. Their very first record, the 11-minute-and-11-second Canada Songs, took a rather standard approach to the traditional sounds of early 2000′s mathcore, but the band did also make a point to integrate an odd, but compelling and enhancing, array of noise elements to bolster their already raucous sound. They soon reinvented themselves on 2006′s Hell Songs, which showed frontman Alexis Marshall abandoning the generic high-pitched grind screams of the band’s debut in favor of a perplexing rapid spoken-word-esque type of sermon delivery, with the rest of the band jumping deep into the rabbit hole of avant-garde metallic chaos and experimentally noisy playing techniques. And as confusing as I remember the result being when I first heard it, it’s a truly one-of-a-kind album whose upfront mystery has continued to beckon an itching need to return to it to try to figure out what the hell it was doing. I was disappointed not in the sound of their subsequent self-titled third album, but in the band’s own dissatisfaction with the project and their direction through that album that led to their temporary disbandment as the most tragic casualty of the album’s tumultuous creation just before its release early in 2010. I liked the record a lot; I appreciated the band working up the courage to grow their songs out beyond the typical spastic minute or two and extending the range of their noisy sonic pallet downward and into more infectiously groovy territory. But singer Alexis Marshall didn’t feel the same adoration for this record I, and a lot of apparently new fans, did. He expressed very clearly his distaste for what he felt was a contrived artistic direction toward a sound not unique to the band or representative of what he thought Daughters should be. While I remember being put off at first by the snottiness I perceived from his bemoaning of his own album just because it was a good deal more accessible than previous efforts (an album I thought was pretty great), I definitely came to understand his position a bit better after a while. Having taken on my own artistic projects, I gained a greater sympathy for that desire to maintain the artistic integrity Marshall lamented, and the band’s self-titled album definitely had a more tangible similarity to other metallic hardcore that could be misconstrued as a minor form of mimicry, not that that’s either inherently bad or even avoidable, but I get that desire to make art that is truly, undeniably your own and not a compilation of your influences. While I still enjoyed that album, it was disappointing that it was what drove the band’s members apart and killed Daughters... until now.

Well, not exactly just now. The band reformed kind of tentatively in 2013 for a few live shows, and as much as I was hoping it might lead to an album, I wasn’t optimistic. And being that it wasn’t until just a few years ago that the band had announced their intent to return to writing, it kind of felt like a Tool-esque situation with a seemingly infinite timeline to finish whatever it was they were doing. However, unlike with Tool and System of a Down, the more time passed, the more fully reunited and rededicated the band seemed to become and the more certain the prospect of a new album became. As long-awaited and highly anticipated as new music from the band was, the release of “Satan in the Wait” a few months ago still felt so sudden and kind of surreal when the band released it on their Bandcamp page. It was finally happening, and it was exactly the kind of returning statement Daughters needed to make. The song was explosive, ambitious, evolved, and the honest return to their artistry the band and fans were hoping for, and also quite the titillating teaser, stretching out far longer and with a great deal more focus on letting the atmosphere of the music direct itself as opposed to their previously intentionally quick-cut changes to ensure they not linger anywhere too long. The song was a fitting preliminary statement for the more expansive experience that was to come. So, with their longest effort yet, boasting the longest songs in the band’s catalog, how did the band do on the rest of You Won’t Get What You Want?

Well... fuck. This album is probably going to have me swearing a lot, because I am goddamn shit-pissed butt-ass floored! You Won’t Get What You Want is both a surprising, but understandably natural expansion on and continuation of Daughters’ cultivated identity, a natural progression from that volatile self-titled release actually, but somehow retains all that vital performative energy that has always made their music feel so honest and captivating. Alexis Marshall very theatrically rambles his way through both elaborate, vivid poetry and unsettling, repetitious mantras of mental instability, and the rest of the band do some truly innovative things with their instruments that I have a genuinely hard time comprehending. And it’s not just a messy noise-fest either; it’s not just a splatter of non-premeditated improvisational bullshit thrown to tape and paraded as fine art. Everything the band do is intentional, and the writing on here finds that sweet duality of pure psychotic chaos and a rare capability to wield it. The album’s lyrics circle around these somewhat tormented narratives and self-assuring thought cycles that all point to some great, malevolent, merciless, all-consuming abstract darkness, which is consistently suggested to be that of the human psyche itself, invoking a fear of what horrors the human mind can inflict upon itself, the idea that you are your own enemy and your mind has plunged you into a dark, inescapable psychological hell.

This album is almost 50 minutes long, which is like Hell Songs and Daughters combined, and an eternity compared to Canada Songs. But even though the band has thrived on brevity and never really had to make sure their music could maintain the attention of the most easily distracted, they do not show any signs of struggling in that department at all. As much as the band’s writing process was more focused on building around central, elongated musical ideas, they bring such a density and unique variety of ideas that there really is no way to be bored at any point along this album’s dark, truly frightening journey. So, let’s get into that journey.

The fucking intro track, “City Song”, scared the shit out of me the first time I played the album because I played it on my newly repaired/upgraded stereo system, in pitch black darkness, at night, and I truly thought the lone snare hits that come in over the humming industrial noise intro were distant, but not so distant gunshots. Unnerving to say the least, but such a fitting way to start the album. Alexis Marshall mostly speaks the lyrics describing a still, and possibly ravaged city in an ominous moaning fashion, as though paranoid and frightened. The mantra “This city is an empty glass” suggests the fragility of this desolate metropolis and the sudden yelps of shock heighten the tension all the more throughout the track. The song rides these very spaced out snare hits and builds on the bass-heavy industrial drone that transforms itself as the verses progress, until a short electronic glitch ushers in a hectic, paranoia-inducing grind of industrial noise and Alexis Marshall’s elevated portrayal of the lyrics’ tremendous unease. And this is just the start.

The second song, “Long Road No Turns”, launches into a whirring spiral of guitar noise that represent nicely the sense of dizziness of both falling through the air and the compressed stress of being caught in a predestined societal cycle. The song is supplemented with these high-pitched distorted vibraphone-like keys (I cannot put my finger on them) and these explosive bursts of percussion that line up with the vocals at the lyrics’ most cynical and malicious lines alluding to the pleasure of watching the suffering of others. The lyrics revolve around climbing high and falling far, certainly alluding to suicide, and getting in line and making mistakes. Marshall says repeatedly that he doesn’t know what to say about it, but that “the road is long the road is dark, and these are just the words to somebody else’s song.” What is certain of the song’s lyrics are the pessimistic outlook of conforming to a heartless society’s rules, the end being suicide, and people being glad to see others fall just as they will too.

The lead single, “Satan in the Wait”, one of the longest songs on the album at seven minutes, follows the narrative of the world’s oppressed (at least those perceiving themselves to be) preparing to join together under the union of violent uprising against those above them, all while being suggested to be the grand scheme of Satan, to plant the seeds of violence in the minds of more and more to open up the world to his chaos through them. The song only sets up this future uprising, tying into the title, Satan still waiting for the world to be ready for his chaotic violence. It’s a bit suggestive of where human civilization is right now, slowly accepting violence and opening up to Satan’s way as Daughters portray. The ending lyrics repeat an expression of things changing more quickly in hindsight, suggesting that in the aftermath of the destruction, humanity will look back and realize how easily and how quickly they were roped into Satan’s plan. The instrumental is built on this eeire guitar siren sound and dark, rumbling bass line (suggestive of Satan’s deep darkness), and a constant tom/crash driven drum pattern, but the choruses incorporate an oddly bright guitar line, which only distorts into more eerie atmospherics as the repetitious exit mantra ensues.

The album’s shortest track, “The Flammable Man”, re-injects paranoia into the album again as Marshall spouts a frenzied slurry of denials of things like lying, living near the ocean, and betting on horse racing his spoken character now avoids out of fear. This fear could be genuine or even nervous denial in the face of interrogation. The ending mantra of “Is something burning here, or is it me?” suggests possible denial by the speaker of the world around him plunging into chaos and his sheltered life being snatched out from under him. He spends his last moments ignoring the impending doom. Musically, the song is the frantic, quick-transitioning anti-joyride Daughters has made themselves known for, a cascade of hurried guitar rhythms and sprinting bass lines that symbolize the speaker’s constant on-edge heart rate below his apathetic denials, ending on a cinematic note of wild, disaster-foreshadowing strings over the blind-faced outro’s mantra.

“The Lords Song”, another shorter track, rides a rather constant high-pitched guitar whir over its punk/thrash drum beat as Marshall delivers another sporadic performance of intense emotional turmoil, repeating the line “I cry about it because I want to” in consistently hectic and vitriolic, if not deranged, fashion. Having addressed the motives of Satan, the album shifts its focus to his rival, God. The song’s speaker, in whatever hellish nightmare of a society has been constructed he exists in, seems to reveal to themselves their own doubts of God’s benevolence, crying, likely through prayer, about the oppressive state of the world only to hear God beckon him to “cry on” in vain for the sadistic amusement of God (or whoever is pretending to be God, as suggested by the “sampled voice of God” line). Musically, it’s probably one of the most standard and predictable songs on the album, by Daughters’ standards, a just barely weak link, but fortunately not much of a blemish on the album’s incredible composition.

The following song, “Less Sex”, constructs a very clear image of addiction as an all-consuming, possessing monster that the song’s speaker welcomed into his home. The lyrics “I let it into my home, I lead it a long way down” indicate that the speaker has carelessly welcomed this unsuspicious thing deep into his mind until he “gave it complete control”. Musically, the song rides a very subtle Reznor-esque industrial kick-drum beat with the occasional echoes of a guitar melody providing the groovy security the speaker probably feels with such an innocuous thing as the precursor to addiction. It’s a soothing song of sorts, but it still carries that hint of malevolence that fits the idea of addiction so perfectly, as eventually a noisy rush of effect-laden guitars overtakes the mix just as the addiction the speaker is ashamed to name has taken over him as he repeats “I gave it complete control”.

The singularly named song, “Daughter”, suggests that it is indeed about one of the band’s members, likely its writer, Alexis Marshall, him being the “Daughter” the title refers to. The song’s instrumentals expound on the crubmling of the false sense of comfort “Less Sex” constructed. Marshall runs through a series of forewarning verses and contrasting defeatist mantras relating to inevitable death as he references the earth-quaking terror of the wrath of the otherwise meek, whose violence is triggered, along with perilous warnings of suicide as a sinister, hunting creature that roams society and preys on one’s own psyche, rather than simply lying passive for humans to come to it. It summons. He also refers to some text message before a fateful plunge into a suicidal night drive as a “pasteurized idea vibrat[ing] a pocket”, perhaps in the sense that it is snuffed out and ignored completely. Violent cymbal crashes break the song’s foreboding atmosphere and plunge everything into a flurry of dissonant, jarring noise as Marshall laments “Oh, love is a tired whore” until the ominous rumble of distorted bass and the heart-shocking drum beat back Marshall’s dejected refrain, “knowing they die her and there”. It’s a lyrically cryptic track, perhaps the most on the whole album at certain verses. But what’s certain is Marshall’s sense of defeatism and cynicism about himself or others avoiding suicide of some kind.

“The Reason They Hate Me” reads like a vicious diatribe against all opposition and criticism to whatever Marshall’s modus operandi is, but it sounds more specific. The glitchy guitar backing and industrial droning over the quick-tempo-ed drum beat feel like an odd choice, but you know what, I’m not going to say anything, because that seems like exactly what Marshall is hoping to draw into his voracious, vitriolic grinder of musical rebuttal, and I am content to enjoy the firing of the song’s synapses and its digestion of its prey from a distance.

The album’s longest track, “Ocean Song”, at seven-and-a-half minutes, finds Alexis Marshall writing and singing from the perspective of a character named Paul. The song finds Paul immediately after coming home and noticing the difference in the sky’s darkness compared to the previous week. A sudden sense of panic within him urges him to run from the cyclic life of monotony and mediocrity he has established, something indeed urgent that tells him to abandon everything and just get away. If Paul is indeed living in the same kind of society songs like “Long Road No Turns” and “Satan in the Wait” detail, he is certainly right to run from the oppressive tedium and humanity’s increased hatred quietly closing in around him. Perhaps Paul is named so in reference to Paul the Apostle whose confrontation with the blinding light of God eventually sent him fleeing from life of persecution. But Paul is moved not to run toward something, just away, away from the crushing boredom and complacency of his shallow, average life of “servitude”. Marshall describes Paul’s euphoria with the release of his shackles in his immediately realized fantasy of fleeing from his constraints. He has nowhere he’s trying to get to, only away from what he knows, and just as everyone’s dream of uprooting and leaving their own poor circumstances for good ends at the stage of where else to go, so does Paul’s, as the song concludes with him running to the ocean wondering what else lies beyond, perhaps symbolic of the death that comes from the only true liberation from the clutches of society’s ubiquity and humanity’s conditions. The song’s chilling instrumentals score the story much like a film, but highlighting the panicked thoughts running through Paul’s mind with the guitars humming at high pitches like choirs and fast-bowed string sections. The song breaks for a momentary calmness as Paul falls into the alley behind his house and begins to run, but it explodes again into cinematic bursts of industrial guitars as Paul sheds his old self in his flight toward anywhere else, finishing with a long ambiguous instrumental section that twists the song in multiple distorted directions. It’s possibly my favorite song on the whole album for its vivid narrative and its well-intertwined instrumentals.

The last song, “Guest House”, is somehow the most unnerving, after all the horror preceding it. It finds Marshall wildly, desperately, insanely screaming to be let into a closed off, boarded-up house, one that could represent a variety of things based on the previous songs. The chilling closing refrain “let me in” that Marshall shouts in panic and agony ties back to the song “Less Sex” where his character let a monstrous addiction into his own home, which has now consumed him ans cast him out. He has no control at all anymore over himself and his desperate cries to be let into a house that no longer belongs to him echo the futile struggle of the compromised human psyche, possessed by an evil that has become the very person it has consumed. In some way, the house represents the speaker’s old life, perhaps the one Paul abandoned, perhaps the ever-turning world (the “incorrigible wheel tilt[ed] at a grotesque angle”) before Satan’s intervention, before mankind made it unbearable and inescapable. Whatever it is, Marshall’s terrified pleas to be let in are fucking visceral and nerve-wracking in a way music doesn’t often accomplish. The explosively heavy instrumentation wraps up the album perfectly with the culmination of all the paranoia and frenzied noise building up to this point as hums of compiled stings, wavering metallic guitar delays and distorted industrial bass drones. It’s the climax of all climaxes I have heard this year, and the kind that leaves me shaken every time.

At this point “I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to say.” I am speechless. Well not really, this is one of my longest pieces ever, and Daughters made it a fucking thrill and hard to not write about endlessly. You Won’t Get What You Want is a truly unsettling challenge to look both inward and outward at the most terrifying ugliness that characterizes humanity, and therefore ourselves. This is the kind of album that really spurs some critical contemplations by holding up the black mirror and refusing to let you look away. With everything all wrapped up, the title takes on so many meanings. This album was by no means the standard Daughters affair, not the return-to-form comeback fans may have wanted. The title could refer to the blunt cynicism of the overall message of the album’s pessimistic portrayal of human civilization, perhaps even the oppressive underlying message of society itself or humanity’s vices: greed, addiction, self-importance, crippling paranoia. Like a cerebral horror film, You Won’t Get What You Want taps into the deepest of our hopes and fears and twists them into tortured nightmares that it convinces you you will never wake up from. Honestly, everything from the band’s timing with their electrifying and shiver-inducing blasts of industrially noisy ear-abuse and to Alexis Marshall’s Oscar-worthy performances of his cynical and poetic lyrics is stellar and hard to even hypothetically improve upon (except for the few moments I mentioned before). This is the kind of album that leaves you really fulfilled, in no need to go immediately put on something else, just sit with it and contemplate the madness of the experience it gave. Consequently, I’m not even ready to contemplate what Daughters might do next, if they do indeed do anything after this blistering magnum opus. All there is to do right now for me is to join in the applause, because goddamn this album has earned it! For all the unanimous hype and praise this record has received, it is definitely deserving of it, at least in my eyes. It is definitely one of the most unique albums I have ever heard and one that I think I will be discovering more about for a long time as I continue to listen to it. Well fucking done, Daughters, on a fantastic comeback. Well done listening to your artistic instincts and creating an honest and powerful piece that you can be incredibly, incredibly proud of!