ALBUM REVIEW: Face Your Biggest Fear – Janus Stark

Peterborough-based rock band JANUS STARK return with their fifth album Face Your Biggest Fear. Like many in the last few years, the band were inspired by the frustrations and anger surrounding lockdown and the current state of the world, and as such Face Your Biggest Fear offers both an outlet for that anger as well as an escape, a distraction from it.

The album is filled with many guitar heavy anthems and overall catchy punk-rock songs, although on first listen it is a little hard to distinguish between the first three tracks (Father Time, Rollin’ With The Punches, and I Don’t Want Your Sympathy). That’s not saying that they sound bad or dull, but they do all seem to blend into each other to the point that a listener could be forgiven for thinking that they were all part of one long and ongoing song.

Luckily things pick up around fourth track Eddie ‘N’ Larkin with its anthemic chanting and outstanding guitar playing, and with that any doubts from the first three tracks are immediately forgotten.

Overall, Face Your Biggest Fear is brilliant rock album with many punk influences. Across these 11 tracks, it’s easy to hear shades of the likes of GREEN DAY (Reassuring seems heavily influenced by them in particular), THE OFFSPRING and THE CLASH – which are all good things indeed. Much of the record will be perfect to play throughout the summer; it has a song for many a scenario, from the “screw you” vibes of Clusterfuck, to the party perfect track Mariana Trench which you can picture everyone dancing to, to the just plain awesome Stick.

Things take a completely different turn however when we get to the closing track Shoot Me If I Don’t Have The Right. In this eight-minute-long song we go through a range of emotions, from serious and frustrated to hopeful and positive – something of a reflection of what we have all been through in the past few years.

And that’s the thing with Face Your Biggest Fear; its aim seems to be mainly to serve as a distraction from the overall carnage and horrors that have happened in the world in the last few years, trying to remind you that hope and beautiful things still exist in the world. And yet, crucially the final track is also a reminder to not forget about the terrible things that go on; to remember and learn from them so that they don’t happen again.

Rating: 8/10

Face Your Biggest Fear is set for release on July 22nd via self-release.

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