ALBUM REVIEW: You Won’t Get What You Want – Daughters
DAUGHTERS are a band with a chequered history, from brutal grindcore beginnings, which over time have refined and evolved themselves into a complex blend of math rock, noise, ambient, drone and even shoegaze at times. After the mixed reception amongst their fanbase of their self-titled release, they took an eight-year hiatus before this new release, which is a return to the sound they started to develop in 2010. At its most basic, You Won’t Get What You Want is a brooding, melancholic post-rock album. It traverses frantic, anxiety-ridden noise-rock soundscapes and then moves onto slow, rhythmic spoken word sections. It wastes no time in establishing its place as a record that discards genre-expectations, or what fans of the band might want based on previous recordings.
The opener, City Song, ramps up an instantly anxious feeling in the listener, with droning synth and irregular, sporadic kick drums. As in the rest of the album, the voice of vocalist Alexis S F Marshall complements these sounds perfectly, with frantic, impassioned spoken word. In the last section of City Song, grating, high pitched screeching breaks out which is then quickly replaced by the solo track of spoken word. It’s these juxtapositions and emotionally jarring sounds that define You Won’t Get What You Want.
It’s not all experimental and jarring, however. Moments like in the song Satan In The Wait are brooding and melancholic, but they are added to by melodic keys that run through the song. Whilst repetitive, this adds an extra layer to the song which keeps things new and different throughout the record. Other moments of thoughtful melody come on Less Sex, a bluesy, rhythmic state of affairs that wouldn’t be out of place in late JOHNNY CASH material, with the added grating synth that’s present on most of the songs on this record.
Their grindcore beginnings have not been totally lost to the sands of time, however. The Flammable Man comes at the listener with walls of sound, hammering drums and pleading, desperate lyrics. The Lords Song and closer Guest House also have similar approaches, showing three main types of track on the album. These three avenues of blues, noise and spoken word illustrate the forward-thinking nature of DAUGHTERS. They aren’t here to make a blues album, a grindcore album, or a spoken word piece, You Won’t Get What You Want is written just for them – an amalgamation of musical experimentation and ambitious ideas.
Whilst City Song begins with monotonous, droning synth, Guest House closes with the opposite – thumping percussion gives way to an isolated track of beautiful, orchestral synth, leaving the listener with a totally different sound to that evidenced on most tracks on the album. Whether or not this is an album for new listeners is a tricky question. Fans of avant-garde, ambient and noise music will certainly find something to get their teeth into here, and existing fans will most likely be pleased with the effort, passion and experimentation put into this record. Whilst You Won’t Get What You Want is unlikely to propel DAUGHTERS into the mainstream, it is still a landmark release for them.
Rating: 8/10
You Won’t Get What You Want is out now via Ipecac Recordings.
Like DAUGHTERS on Facebook.