Review Summary: Disarmed
Over the last 5 years, The Armed have made a career out of sculpting roses from barbed wire. Once “just” a Converge-ian screm fledgeling, the semi-anonymous and variously-configured collective have since spent their days shapeshifting into/around many post- metal/hard -core things, all the while retaining their riding-aflame-eagle-into-large-typhoon levels of reckless + charming + stupid energy. The group’s endearing preposterousness has only grown with each chameleonic rejig - from the chaotic calculator abuse of
Only Love to the gleeful glitterbomb of
Ultrapop - each pimping out noise / electronic / pop / grind / math as required for their respective visions. It was never just for the sake of it, you see; messy ends were satisfied, always, by the messy means.
Where, then, does
Perfect Saviors fit in? In methodology, it’s much the same: membership unexpected (hi Julien!), marketing hilarious (hi Iggy!) and ethos mischievous (forever, always!). But aesthetically? Uh. Alternative timeline
The Strokes at best, mid-career
Linkin Park at worst: THIS IS
AN ROCK ALBUM(!!!), absent nipple tassles and/or tiara and/or frills, and it wants you to know it.
“Perfect Saviors is our completely unironic, sincere effort to create the biggest, greatest rock album of the 21st century”
Straightforward mission statement or yet another hoodwink,
you never can tell with bees, but this atypically direct messaging from unmasked frontman, Tony Wolski, feels like it contains at least part of the truth. Sure, the group dabble in quiet synths, the occasional freakout and a pop-fueled boogie or two throughout their 5th LP, but the rock drums and rock guitar and rock vocals and rock
everything do seem to be the focus, unadorned and unapologetic and unashamed and, uh, barren.
Is this a good thing? Erm, Google “barren”. Before potshots, though, some disclaimers: (a) imbuing art(ist) with assumed intent (or lack thereof) is a dangerous (stupid) game, particularly for a group so adept at obfuscation; (b) blindly bemoaning accessibility is also silly, including here, where the wider appeal appears more symptom than cause; and (c) demanding rigid stylistic consistency from any band, let alone
The fucking
Armed, would be antithetical to the fundamentals of creativity itself (and bad, you dork). With those caveats in place, my opinion is this: what an underwhelming record! Gosh, where is the wow, the screm, the giddy flailing maniacality(!!!) that used to be the beguiling, thumping heart of this outrageously nonsensical band?!
For me at least, the knack The Armed have had for their aforementioned flower moulding has been the charm of it all, prompting elation in-chest to the tune of nuclear warheads turned poetry recital. Understandably, then, their gear-shift away from all that deftly channelled NOISE leaves me a bit miffed. It wasn't the precise flavour of chaos that mattered, though - the unpredictability in that respect was part of the fun - but that at least one side of that chaos was always present in each wacko iteration, punctuating every movement, defining the reverberations; that was where the magic was. Through this, the band’s soul was maintained and expanded, simultaneously and goodly, with a grace and electricity infrequently seen in their genre.
By contrast,
Perfect Saviors gives too much ground to its new pastel preferences. The big-dick silly-hat energy is not here. It is a very sensible album. It shouldn’t be.
Gang of Youths -styled singalongs “Everything’s Glitter” and “Patient Mind” are as triumphant as the collective have ever sounded, yet the licks land limp + gang vox ring hollow, dialled down from 11 to 4 atop murk-free (boring) production. The same dull restraint lurks within “Sport Of Measure” and “FKA World”, Robbie Williams cleans and punctual snare hits doing their duty, but refusing to smash arm/leg/face through door, instead prioritising corny over crunchy. To their credit, the group do go postal,
eventually: “Clone” fucking
fucks with a peppy ///b o u n c e/// of a riff, into sunsoaked crooning, into post-core-de-la-metal, into this great natural contrast between all three that
god is really rather grand. Similar songcraft wizardry is found within “Sport of Form”, glitched vocal harmonics finding pockets of calm between wubbs, landmines and sharks until the beauty prevails with the catharsis of cri: “does anyone even know you, does anyone even care”. THIS IS IT, the CHAOS-cum-BLISS, the MAGIC-soul-SAUCE, and THEN-it's-GONE. oh.
The final third takes the harshest dive via the no-no of inverted ends and means. Taking the wrong leaf from the 5th-wave emo playbook, The Armed practice genre-phasing as a matter of form > substance, dipping toes but not committing. With this apparent sheepishness, the closing tunes lean yet harder into the album’s main crutches: underweight cleans, blah production and tepid songwriting. The deets: “Liar 2” gets its groove on and does nothing with it; “Vatican Under Construction” has a crack at the build-release-tension-ting, but forgets to unclench; and the “In Heaven”/”Public Grieving” closing duo introduce jazz-lite and galactic hues - without foregrounding - in the collective’s safest and least exciting curveball to date (big
Genghis Tron comeback vibes circa 2021 hmm).
For an art project notorious for “innovation” in every conceivable flavour,
Perfect Saviors was, in some sense, inevitable; it is, by all accounts, a different album to the last album that was their album (uh). That being said, reinvention should not be overfetishised - it's a signifier of virtue, bumpkins, not virtue in and of itself, prone to false positives - and this time, for my money, the coin flip has landed on
meh. Perhaps I am being too harsh - missing the joke, not taking it seriously enough, potentially both - and, ultimately, my dissatisfaction could just come down to taste. I like the loud-grr-screms; I miss the loud-grr-screms; the rock-tastic antics here are not a fair trade. Then again, as above, I’m not sure that’s the root of the problem. Rejuvenate the chaos, dial those pastel preferences up to 5,429,478, and
Perfect Saviors probably
could have been the
quote best rock album ever. It should have been bigger. It should have been better. It could have been
everything. After all, The Armed
are “the world’s greatest band”, are they not?
