Review Summary: Daughters continue expanding their sonic skullfuckery
Rhode Island's Daughters have always walked a dangerous line of progression with each album. Their 2003 debut,
Canada Songs, took the freeflowing hostility of grindcore legends The Locust and, with a total disregard for taste and common sense, amped up the schizophrenic nature of their tortured dissonance to create what can arguably be seen as one of the subgenre's best releases in the last decade. In 2006 they released their follow up,
Hell Songs, and while at times it bared an almost uncanny resemblance to its predacessor, vocalist Alexis Marshall's change from unintelligible banshee wails to clean vocals allowed Daughters to expand on new ways to deliver their sonic skullf
uckery.
Enter
Daughters, the band's third album. Following the blueprint laid out in
Hell Songs,
Daughters is a perverted brew of angular dissonance that has Daughters shedding what was left of their grindcore exterior and ascending to a new level of musical haphazardness. Case in point, the songs on
Daughters actually feel like songs. Unlike the bottle rocket-like nature of previous Daughters releases,
Daughters is developed with a refined sense of focus and personality, giving each track the opportunity to grow into something unique, something eerie, while still retaining its unnacessible yet rewarding nature. As if whining axes and brooding drums weren't enough to build this uneasy tension, Alexis Marshall's wounded utterances sound like the mad ramblings of Elvis Presley as he strained away his final drugged up moments on his porcelain throne, making
Daughters not only one of the most jarring, but also one of the most neurotic albums in recent memory.
