Review Summary: yooooo
"Millennials is a violent and over-the-top distorted record, born in a completely saturated scene and produced by four hyperactive fellows, who for obscure reasons decided few years ago not to work a full time boring job but to invest their money, time and mental health in heavy underground music. One can notice they are eventually older now; their hardcore got lazier, fatter and darker."
I really like this description because it simultaneously contradicts itself and tells the full truth.
Millenials is indeed a violent and dramatic piece of work. It also chugs along in malignant lethargy; the drums sound like they are being hit by an old man who is really pissed off and kinda doesn't want to be making music for his dumb band. The term "fat" gets thrown around with decent frequency these days when describing production tones that relish the bass, and while I too do appreciate a good low end, Coilguns almost make a point of driving this home when songs like "Deletionism" awkwardly hobble along, dizzy from the weight of its own ass. Let's not forget about the word "darker", which also appears in the above description though! Chunky monkey production and exhausted performances would be worthy of little merit if they weren't spurred on by the Pass Go Collect $200 stairway to m/ AoE maelstrom that is dissonance. You know what they say! The fastest way to a girl's heart is the tritone. The dude who runs Convulsing made comparisons to Breach on Facebook (another band adverse to melody) one time, and he was pretty spot on. If you've listened to
Kollapse and have enjoyed it muchly, this album was made specifically for you to say "wow, this sounds like
Kollapse by that band Breach".
And the description continues!
"There is even a new tribal feel to it, just like if those guys were still naïvely dreaming of building a parallel society somewhere in a cursed country where deviance and free self expression would matter as much as business skills and communication concepts."
I think this is a little misleading as Coilguns weren't ones to shy away from neanderthalic tomfoolery in their last release. The rest is fair game, however. "Spectogram" opening with two minutes of fairly unobtrusive noise to give the band some time to tune their guitars and slander the bassist feels both wonderfully immersive and also lazy as sh
It. The drumming to follow for the next three or seven minutes can actually be dictated using nothing but woof-based onomatopoeia quite accurately and concisely within the context of a review.
"woof ba-ba-ba-bark-ba-bark-bark / / woof ba-ba-ba-bark-ba-bark-bark", and so on.
"Millennials was written and recorded in january 2016 by the band itself, self-engineered on old second hand tapes in a four rooms wood stove heated vacation house, lost right in the middle of the desperate monoculture landscapes of central germany."
This seems like a fairly poetic take on some possibly objective truths, and I will add to this statement no further.
"What came out is a breathless, lo-fi and lo-tuned epileptic record, that roughly questions their own behaviour as partially conscious citizens of a scarily weird and exciting globalized music world."
When everything is moving at full force, things actually sound remarkably clean. I feel the grittier nuggets tend to protrude from the band's low end when they slow it all down, however, and thankfully that's a fairly common occurrence because damn this thing kicks like a mule. That's a pretty vague sentence probably. It's probably due to the type of tone the guitarists are using in all likelihood because the riffing that happens on the middle of the fretboard often times evokes pristine progcore similarities which certainly bring me from the land of unconscious enjoyment to conscious citizenry of a slightly peeved music world. "But Breach!", two of you might be wondering, and you are correct!
As fate would have it, Coilguns' approach to riffing is largely centred around huge chords and persistent strumming. The alt-picky Botch-isms of the metalcore masses only seem to crop up in fleeting like on the track "Wind Machines For Company", something quite refreshing for someone who's willing to namedrop Breach four times in the same review. Ultimately, I'm happy with the Bandcamp description Coilguns used for this record. I think it describes the album and the mindset behind the album and maybe even the mindset a potential listener should approach the record with pretty damn well! I feel like the incessant Rage Against the Pastiche thrown around in the lyrics is a bit paste, but then again so is this criticism within the realm of music that is hard and core and both.
"Self Employment Scheme" kinda putters to a conclusion. The riffing sounds super stupid at the end as the guitarists ask themselves why they are making music in such a monetarily depriving environment. The way in which it mirrors the ephemeral totality of the startup industry is stupidly accurate and makes me laugh fairly hard. Props, lmao.
Influences
"I can’t kiss you, baby—you smell like piss!" -Chuck Berry
"People ***ing hate cunts like Phil Collins, and if they don't — they fucking should." -Noel Gallagher
"When an instrument fails on stage it mocks you and must be destroyed." -Trent Reznor
That's what Coilguns is all about, folks. Taken straight from their Facebook page. That's what
Milennials is about, more specifically (even if this isn't the band's intention). This record is noisy and chubby and pissed off and kinda a bit bored with itself in the same way a small child might be when they realise they forgot to bring their iPad to the toilet. It is also like Breach. Sick.
