Review Summary: more ass than SteakByrnes' ass
The year is twenty-five of twenty, the world is dying, and Walmart's favourite breakthrough act is back with a rock LP bloodless enough that it made Alexis Petridis' album of the week. In a sour reminder that, however many times you write it off, irony will never die quite as hard as punk, this unfortunate record is titled
Never Enough. Now, some of the album's tedious qualities are shared with its arena-sweeping predecessor
Glow On – frontman Brendan Yates' starched out drawl, the band's affected frat-punk poppishness, their overuse of predictable grooves – but this latest album distinguishes itself through sheer indulgence, for better and (mainly) worse. Although I found
Glow On a joylessly economical enterprise, there can little doubt that that album's ultra-focused songwriting was ultimately an asset; it certainly helped the band out in their attempt at a good-times genre juggle, and it didn't hurt that no individual track hung around long enough to make a stink.
Say goodbye to that greased lightning writing machine! The bulk of
Never Enough sees the band chewing over equivalent (read: thin) substance as though the one thing
Glow On's formula needed was a more insistent spotlight on drab central hooks and more turgid pacing to ensure that its dynamics never caught the listener off-guard. If
Glow On took the energy, aggression and charisma of punk and reduced it to a packet of cheese and onion crisps for mass export,
Never Enough's great innovation is to pour a whole bottle of maple syrup on top in the hope of adding sustenance, viscosity, value for money, or some other shibboleth for too many hours spent in the company of PR shithawks (presumably the same people who booked an entire army's worth of largely extraneous production and performance credits). Few of its tracks come anywhere close to snappiness – "Birds" is a notable exception – and even its catchier numbers drag their feet in a manner that feels entirely unnatural for the level of energy they aim to command. Prime culprits here include "Dull"'s fumbled resurrection of
Glow On's "Blackout", one-note boredom-banger "Sore", and "Seein' Stars"' painstaking efforts to eke three minutes' worth of traction out of one space-gazed motif. Many of the band's efforts to broaden their genre palette backfire similarly, per the listless dream pop of underwhelming closer "Magic Man" or "Dreaming"'s insufferable attempt to buoy up two minutes of pop-rock shrapnel with an ill-advised horn arrangement.
Now, you could easily see all this as an unwelcome symptom of kicking out a key songwriter for alleged substance abuse (
very punk rock): the bulk of this album drags its feet and seems intent on regurgitating whatever charm its predecessor could lay claim to without any of the discipline or agility that ultimately saw it off. However, on the rare occasions when the band lean out on atmospheric tangents, they prove disarmingly capable as a soundscaping act. Take the extended coda of album highlight "Look Out For Me" or the outro of the otherwise humdrum "I Care": these see Turnstile jettison linear songwriting and coast off into oblivion, and they sound excellent! They make ample use of their intimidatingly tight rhythm section to ensure these stretches are far more than open space – "Look Out For Me" in particular shows the power of a patient instrumental build to subvert expectations and deliver slow-burning gratification like no earworm chorus in the world could lay claim to. At points like these, when the band stop clinging onto the processed, airless ideal of radio punk that they've long since templated within such mercilessly precise confines,
Never Enough convinces me of their talent and potential more than any of
Glow On's boilerplate songlets.
So what next? Turnstile discourse typically still involves an eye-watering quantity of disclaimers attesting the degree to which the band are/aren't/don't need/never abandoned
hardcore, but at this point one can't help but imagine a world where they'd drop the little-punk-act-that-could conceit entirely, quit using dumb muscle to prop up edgeless pop-rock, and play *anything but hardcore* with relish. The prospect of Turnstile as, say, a dream pop act jamming over dub grooves, their anthemic woo-hoos left in the rehearsal room or reverberated into a background accent, is far more attractive than the riffified post-U2 rubbish their output has veered further and further into. Is this too bold, too preferential a call to count as a reasonable criticism? Absolutely—and yet,
Never Enough's tepid reheats demand
some form of urgent rethink. Not even the Turnstile fanbase can claim enough happy eaters for this one.
