Review Summary: GOD GAVE ROCK & ROLL TO YOU
Throw up the horns, brother! Big rock is saved! Temporarily!
It’s been seven long, painful, arduous, f|ucking, sometimes alright years, but
I Will Get To The Sky On These Strong Legs is upon us, with nine beautiful passages of hard rocking, rolling, majesty. It probably won’t save you, most people won’t read this, but at least it’s a really f|ucking good record by a really f|ucking good rock band.
Starting out as a lo-fi shoegaze band playing small shows in Kent, sometime around 2014 they really got into the likes of
Sleep and
Melvins, and messed around with local sludge rock heroes
Fuoco and
Gang. The result is a pilgrimage to the holy land of rock & roll, where big riffs are free to roam and by god it is majestic.
This is epitomised in the opening two tracks. ‘Druid’s Pipe’ is heavy as heavy can be, a doom-laden stoner metal jaunt who’s riff slowly builds and builds into a full-fat big-ass smoked-out rock tune for seven minutes, and descends into a controlled frenzy for the last two, segueing perfectly into ‘Starship Commander’, which wastes no time throwing itself into a bloodied full-throttle moshpit jam. Headbanging grunge guitars, jaunty piano keys, and ‘woo-ooh’ vocals collide into a tune that is just exciting, riding on the great vessel Albion to the skies above.
‘Deep Green’ is just uplifting as hell man, a truly righteous, stomping affair of guitar heroics and pumping drums that ushers in ‘Sea Was Angry’, a tune that’s been in the works for at least three or four years now; a delicate dream pop ballad, reminiscent of
Ride and
Slowdive, that still fits in with the band’s current aesthetic of ripping guitar solos. Some absolutely beautiful melodies are here.
The ‘Long Hair’ trilogy is full of screaming riffs and anthemic hooks, muscular emo songs that are as fragile as they are bearing their teeth, ready to fight. Each part is multi-faceted, veering from anxious comedowns to slamming crashes. Beefed up from previous demo recordings, it is worth noting the stellar production job throughout the record; loud and proud, but without sacrificing the quant acoustic guitars sometimes heard in these songs, adding extra layers to the assault.
This acoustic backing is most heard in ‘Bull of Heaven’, where it used to add a contrast to the brooding atmospherics of the track, a foreboding sense of dread throughout to the shredding shrieks that close the track, a reworking of previous tune ‘Gunblade’ only everything amped up beyond.
And then we have ‘LSD Over Tokyo’, closing the album just as it has closed almost every live set they’ve performed over the years. Finally on hot wax, it is a feast of lurching bass, lofty melodies, and screamed gang vocals, a rousing absolute rocking tune that only the truest and best rock bands can achieve; it cleanses the soul bruthas and sistahs! It fights for its love of rock and roll and good mates and better tunes, it descends into jam band chaos in one last attempt at trailing the great plains to the holy land of rock & roll. Whether or not it gets there is totally beyond the f|ucking point mate, it just bloody tried its hardest.
I Will Get To The Sky On These Strong Legs by Inevitable Daydream will sadly not top many album of the year lists, because you lot don’t deserve true honest rock and f|ucking roll like this. This is white hot s|hit, it’s not a blueprint for a better world but by God is there a lot of love and a lot of blood in this and it will make you feel f|ucking alive. You deserve at least that.
“Don’t ask me why I obsessively look to rock ’n’ roll bands for some kind of model for a better society. I guess it’s just that I glimpsed something beautiful in a flashbulb moment once, and perhaps mistaking it for prophecy have been seeking its fulfillment ever since.” – Lester Bangs
