ALBUM REVIEW: Plagueboys – Grave Pleasures

When you look at certain objects, they have certain images and sounds, feelings and emotions associated with them. Take a knife for example, you pick it up nonchalantly to chop vegetables or fillet meat, but there’s also a violence to knives — it’s weaponised and vicious if chosen to be. GRAVE PLEASURES find the same violence in the nihilism scattered throughout their new album Plagueboys. In this gothic and bleak post-punk record the Finnish five-piece dissect some of the most curious of topics until they find the dark in all of them. 

With a creep in they begin, Disintegration Girl covers being robbed of any sense of self or stability; with a striking vocal similarity to that of BAUHAUS’ Peter Murphy, Mat McNerney sings of losing it all alongside energetic drums but sombre basslines, keeping things danceable in the chorus. Heart Like A Slaughterhouse slows down soon after, wading through the profoundness of a damaged organ, one that keeps you breathing. 

High On Annihilation at first glance suggests doom, a be all and end all, but when listening you’ll find GRAVE PLEASURES treat it as a celebration. Craving something truly absolute, in flirting with the violence of that they soundtrack the dance party awaiting us at the end of the world. The infusion of gothic pop overflows, as do tears of contentment. Lead Balloon follows and again circulates this idea of the end. Now it all starts to sink, nothingness in the absence of everything as the casket is carried toward the furnace. It’s bleak. Sonically capturing the essence of an 80s generation that felt doomed, as if only the worst approached them, guitar chords striking to offer such small glimmers of the light. 

In a shocking shift of pace, away from the previous morbid sonics, the riff-driven Society Of Spectres is a moment of rejuvenation amongst the accompanying dourness. Like being dragged through a hedge backwards or a face full of ice water, the unexpected move does indeed catch you off guard, but also pulls you out of what would soon be a pool of your own tears and deepest regrets. Nearing the end, title track Plagueboys begins to wrap up the dystopian narrative in a summative tale of former empire’s rising and falling, metropolises crumbling at the seams and their inhabitants ceasing to exist. 

GRAVE PLEASURES immerse themselves within this sonic environment that is drowning in nihilism, and to commit to such a melancholic theme for the whole album is admirable. For it to turn out as well as it does is impressive. This quintet invigorates gloomy post-punk and bleak subjects with just enough pop. 

Rating: 8/10

Plagueboys is out now via Century Media Records.

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