Review Summary: Good ol' boys..
On their follow-up to 2015’s gauzy, dynamic
Catharsis, Texas noise outfit Institute crank up the fuzz and rocket fuel, and wheel out the best and most cohesive record of their career so far. Bleak and incensed,
Subordination has things to say and a crunch-packed way of saying them.
There is still a slipshod element to their brand of driving noise punk, but even in the face of that stylistic sloppiness,
Subordination feels tighter and more purposeful than
Catharsis. They bury guitar gradations in pools of static, so that when a particularly tasty line does break to the surface, it sounds as a potent ambush, focused and loud and sharp. Opener “Exhibitionism” sets that mode early. The clean fretwork that suddenly cleaves the song in two is so seamless that the mind instantly runs back to those early Black Flag EP’s. The declarative and mercurial “Only Child” that follows shifts the band into chugging 80’s hard rock. Most of it hits all the right spots with all the right levels of verve.
Front-man Moses Brown’s atonal, almost detached delivery brings to mind mid-70’s post-punkers Wire and The Fall. He rants the way an irked drunk might at the end of the night, too coarse from booze and smokes to manage anything beyond a rasping drawl. And though he never gets out first gear, the clashing effect his apathetic vocals create against the marching music builds a transposing push-pull moment that makes whole songs vibrate.
Passing moments of impassiveness do create a few weaker points here. That backbone of wobbly feedback that runs through the album’s entirety begins to undermine it at the mid-point, and on less modulated and more heavy-handed tracks like “Oil Money” and “Human Law,”
Subordination starts receding under its own weight.
That slight slump doesn’t last long, and the band cap off the record by ratcheting up the anger and the thrust. “Good Ol’ Boys” leaps and pummels atop a pulsing bass-line, and closer “Powerstation” might be the finest song Institute have cut yet; a dissonant churning rocker.
It’s always exciting to see where young bands like Institute can go. Their DIY ethos distances themselves from corporative work-sets and salvages them from the drawbacks a more officiated release may present. They also manage to slip social consciousness into their work without collapsing into sanctimonious banality. This is casually pessimistic music made by people who spend the bulk of their days in the same plodding daily momentum as the rest of us. Which is why, if this band continue carrying off this sort of tenacity, there’s no telling how far their reach can extend, even if it never rises past small guerilla venues.
