Review Summary: A dark and brooding effort, up there with other recent dystopian albums, Day And Age is hampered by a lack of immediate appeal next to Frost*'s other albums but is arguably more engaging over the long haul, and features the band's best production to date.
2020 was a rough year, probably for absolutely everyone. If it will be forgotten in recent memory, it only be because even worse years may come along to dethrone it, and if that happens, it may be an issue of a self-perpetuating cycle, a cascade. Whether due to global warming, our volatile age of global politics, end-game capitalism, or what have you, it seems like every year gives us something not just to be sad about, but to *keep* being sad about. The existential fear being forced on all but the most hardy has not been lost on musicians, with everyone from Bring Me The Horizon to Father John Misty to even indie pop stars like Weyes Blood and Rina Sawayama taking cracks at records that examine the seams of society slowly but surely being strained.
One band I was expecting to dive into this mood, but not as forcefully as they have, is Frost*. Their 2016 album Falling Satellites was a masterpiece, an incredibly well-rounded ode to life itself, a desperate and panicked outlook on mortality brought on partially by the death of lead singer Jem Godfrey's father. Day And Age, however, flips the personal existentialism of their last album into a global one, commenting on the grind of modern life and how our own ignorances are causing the world as a whole to become unglued. At points, it seems to mock the idea of personal tragedy in the face of a deeper kind of fear, almost laughing at how quaint Falling Satellites was in hindsight.
At least that's the impression I get after many solid listens of the album. It is a dour, depressing listen, the kind that makes NO DREAM sound like N*SYNC. One would be forgiven for thinking Kill The Orchestra is a direct call-out to AJR and their brand of making mountains out of molehills because they can't look past their own life experiences. The album starts with calling the rest of the listener's life a “short journey”, and they have to get a child to deliver these lines, and it's just one of many chilling moments that can be read a number of ways, but none of them uplifting.
Which is not to say Day And Age has no pure thrills that will satisfy any Frost* fan. The title track kicks off the record, and even in its radio edit, it was a blast of pure energy built on one of their best dual keys and guitar riffs this side of Heartstrings, and even bends in surprising ways in how the underlining bass changes tone throughout the chorus. The album version includes a good six minutes of jamming, with some more blistering keys riffs, chugging breakdowns and haunting interpolations of childrens' choir vocals. It's definitely a lot faster than openers like Hyperventilate, but it still scratches the itch of a barn-burner of a track to start the record.
Another instrumental highlight includes The Boy Who Stood Still, where actor Jason Isaacs does some spoken word of dark mysticism, akin to the lyrics of previous song Pocket Sun, while the band bashes out a techno-heavy jam based on a syncopated keyboard rhythm. It's some seriously bouncy stuff, and the instrumental version included on the deluxe edition would sound right at home on the VA-11 HALL-A soundtrack, or on a later electronically-charged Genesis album. The modulation on this song is detailed and engaging even over seven and a half minutes, and only bolsters the story on top.
In fact, the instrumental palette demonstrates a more egalitarian approach to songwriting this time around. Bassist Nathan King gets way more to do this time around, and even though he never gets super technical, he also uses every note to its fullest, whether it be the bouncy licks on The Boy Who Stood Still or the deep snarling backdrop provided on Kill The Orchestra and Repeat To Fade. And although the album features three different session drummers, the writing per song is different enough that the grooves were never the dissonant factor, and I was never distracted.
Unfortunately, there is one factor of their presumed newfound direction that was for the worse, and that was giving only three lead vocal credits to Jem Godfrey, with the five other tracks being helmed by guitarist and often backing vocalist John Mitchell. And one of the songs led by Godfrey has the spoken word guest actor on it, so yeah. Mitchell is not a bad singer, but he has always been leagues behind Godfrey, and it does hamper the otherwise potent drama of songs like Skywards, which call for a hugely emotive or soaring vocal performance that he has, quite simply, never had the range to offer. I was exceptionally worried this would be the case with the release of lead single Terrestrial, easily the weakest and most generic song on the album.
It is also worth noting that the band challenged themselves not to include any solos this time around, and this does rob Day And Age of a sense of immediacy that their other projects, even the B-sides EP, had. No song is a drag, but Day And Age is an album to marinate in, and you're not going to be able to pick out standout moment after standout moment as I could with Falling Satellites, where every new riff or solo is an occasion. On the flipside, the more atmospheric and thoughtful direction lends itself to the slightly more restrained but no less colourful production.
Every song has little details peppered in to spice up some of the more languid songs on offer. Waiting For A Lie sounds a little like Something I Can Never Have, from the Nine Inch Nails debut of all things, but obviously a young Trent Reznor was never going to whip out a piano line that intricate, nor might have he included the mixture of distorted strings and hyper-twee synth at the halfway mark. Island Life, true to its name, has a slight tropical bent, with a shimmering glittery-ness in the guitar tone bolstered by a high tempo, but it also features a return of the whining viola from Dividing Line and Rage..., which has always been great at adding drama to proceedings.
All of this? Honestly, it is secondary to the album's most defining attribute, either its biggest strength or weakness depending on how I am feeling at the time. Day And Age's lyrical content features some of Frost*'s most direct and despondent work yet. Again, the album opens with a child basically telling me I don't have much time left on this Earth, before the chorus mantra of the title track states that “we're living in a dying age, the writing's on the wall”. Other hooks such as “kill the orchestra, we're dying anyway” or “stop staring upwards, what's skywards is not to blame” also engender a deep sense of dread and unease.
When I think of the context of Falling Satellites' release, in the middle of 2016, before Trump was sworn in, but right around the time of Brexit, and compare it to Day And Age releasing when Covid-19 is still going strong, among other things, I can only see Day And Age as an amplification of the band's past anxieties now that the issues are so much more pressing in real life. The overarching theme of the album seems to be how escapism is a double-edged sword, asking whether the comfort provided is worth the distraction from a reality that, in every sense, does not care. Every so often, a few voices will tell us “everything is okay” and that we should “enjoy ourselves”. But towards the end of the album, Jem himself starts screaming both mantras while addressing the listener as “scum”. Is he role-playing as an uncaring world leader that is beyond the whims of the public, or is it he himself dressing us down for indulging in a silly little prog rock album? Could it be both?
This mood of despair, trying to turn away from the oncoming wreckage, or wanting to just run away from everything, underlines every moment of the album. The Boy Who Stood Still could just be read as a silly story about a boy gaining weird super-powers, or it could be a Dr. Manhattan-esque metaphor for feeling above and beyond Earth's woes, and wanting to just be able to distance one's self. Skywards is explicitly nihilistic and atheist, and Kill The Orchestra, in its dark musical passages mired in distorted electronic piano, features a lot of dead-end and suicidal imagery. Day And Age and Repeat To Fade are more direct criticisms of modern living, and you'd have to be silly to miss how Island Life slots into that, with very candid mention of distracting yourself through fun when “we're all f*cked anyway”. The album is just this growing mass of despondence verging on paranoia, going so far as to sample that one Karen meme (WAKE UP!) at the end of Kill The Orchestra. It is...a bit much, admittedly.
But, sometimes the compromise is worth it for the art. Day And Age sets out to be an exhausting and depressing outlook on societal living and how deliberately little we are doing to right our collective wrongs, even as they aren't “ours”. It definitely succeeds, but the lack of any instant hooks and only featuring a few fun time neo-prog grooves does limit the album's appeal, albeit not its longevity. This is an album to be listened to many times over, to pick up on all its nuances, but if you wanted this album's sentiments in one song, with a hook, and a bombastic solo, Exhibit A from their last EP was a brilliant glimpse into what this album could have been if it was a little more unrestrained. But I would never say I was disappointed with Day And Age, either. It may not have been the album I wanted as the follow-up to my favorite album of all time, but it's definitely the album I needed in 2021.
