Daughters
Canada Songs
Robotic Empire
To the extent that a spazz-/grindcore band can be surrounded by hype, that’s what Daughters has been exposed to lately. Epitaph noiseniks The Locust have surely pointed the hipness spotlight in their direction, but Daughters were bound to raise a few eyebrows regardless, seeing that three fifths of the band used to be in As The Sun Sets.
It’s good to see Daughters overcome their former band’s legacy and even to surpass anything ATSS ever recorded. Canada Songs may not represent the pinnacle of what this band will achieve with time, but this first full-length album (“full-length” meaning you get ten songs in eleven minutes – speedy stuff) is pretty close to stunning. Where The Locust’s latest album is incessantly compelling in its attempts to transcend the band’s former achievements, Daughters are more intent on shifting the genre’s focus rather than crossing over. And as a result, Canada Songs is a surprisingly streamlined, pummeling record, taking a far more direct and explicit approach than one might reasonably expect.
Not that this is radio-fodder just yet. It’s as chaotic and multi-layered as one could possibly hope for; an intriguing mesh of biting guitars, blastbeats and inaudible screams delivered at maximum speed. Still, there’s a slaying, progressive attack to the songs that lends them a grindingly extreme nature, and that places Daughters a far step away both from Locust’s ever more inwards-looking complexity and from, say, Discordance Axis’s artsy ferociousness.
What this is, then, is the sound of a debuting band discovering its unique voice. And it’s a sound that grows ever more intriguing with each new listen. Unsettling and confusing as Daughters are, this is a remarkably captivating and intriguing album that’ll keep you crawling back for more.
Robotic Empire: http://www.roboticempire.com/
