Rocker (feedbot)
Gold Member
Imagine the scene. You have a date, you want to feel refreshed. So you go to the gym, you work out hard, you spend four years lifting weights, eating chicken and rice, and watching your macros until your body looks like it belongs in a Marvel movie but you’re worried about wrinkles. So, just before you leave the house you inject your face with venom. Your date sits opposite, staring at your swollen lips, and says “Wow, you remind me of the new Rise Against record.”
Ten albums into their career, Rise Against are ready for something new. To find new way to express themselves. Something fresh. They don’t want to become unrecognisable, but they do want to try something new. So they enlisted producer Catherine Marks, who has worked with St Vincent and Boygenius, not someone you might expect and that is reflected in the results; One, the band sounds absolutely energised. Two, that sound is… divisive.
Two, three or even four year album cycles, time is the advantage. The songs are always strong, they never feel rushed. This is the case here, in fact, it contains the strongest set of songs in years. It is the sound of a band refreshed and certainly the most aggressive since 2008’s ‘Appeal To Reason’ when Zak Blair joined on lead guitar, possibly ever. With its hard stops, ‘I Want It All’ is absolutely vicious, while ‘Forty Days’ is awkward, rough and one of the noisiest tracks they’ve committed to tape. The harmonic opening riff on ‘Damage Is Done’ is also wickedly propulsive and even the one time they revisit the mid-level rock sound that defines much of their recent output on ‘Us Against The World’ it absolutely seethes.
This is easily the band’s most interesting record too, while still maintaining a recognisable Rise Against sound and the electronic shuffle found on the title track is unlike anything they’ve tried before. It’s still powered by a buzzing bassline and feels familiar but offers a new approach. However, you cannot separate the songs from the way they are presented and the production does not suit the band, at all. At times, specifically on ‘Black Crown’, you understand what they’re going for; a swirly, druggy, shoegaze sound that feels extremely potent. However, a distinctive choice had been made, it’s an unusual choice but it’s also impossible to ignore, like making a delicate flavoured soup and then dumping in a bulb of garlic.
To be clear, the record does not have a ‘bad’ sound – Marks knows what she is doing – parts of it are amazing. The clean guitar tone for example is great. There are spaces for the instruments, often it’s powerful, crisp and there’s a bite to the harder songs, but it also sounds wrong. Not because melodic hardcore has to sound a certain way, but because the unconventional production does not suit the band’s rough edges. Parts of the sound are weird, making for an unpleasant overall sound. Often the songs are cluttered in strange ways and are combined with a soft, white-noisy edge. It is particularly unpleasant on ‘Sink Like A Stone’, which hisses like a busted amplifier and sounds genuinely ugly. And not, punk rock ugly either; celebrity, house on the Hollywood hills ugly. It’s a far cry from the honesty of their previous records. The question is who listened to this and thought it sounded good?
So, perhaps the best example of where things go wrong is the shimmery acoustic song ‘Gold Long Gone’ which is bathed in swirly beauty, except of course, it showcases the actual problem, Tim McIlrath’s voice sounds like crap. If you’re ever looking for the perfect title for a record ‘Ricochet’ is it. The definition is ‘a shot that rebounds off a surface’. That is exactly what is happening with the reverb smothering his voice, making him sound drunk, lackadaisical and often out of tune. It’s not auto-tuned or electronic but it has a tinny, distant, and echoey reflection that draws attention to the recording’s artifice. Now, this approach is probably ideal for an artist like St Vincent or a singer whose voice is soft enough to layer but McIlrath is presented with a strange, distant, buzzing sound that is deeply unpleasant and literally headache inducing. And, as he sits on top of the mix, you can’t avoid it.
Sure, there are people who don’t notice that voices are heavily compressed or auto-tuned or whatever but for the rest of us, it’s tinny, metallic, and sharp to the ears. If you’ve ever had a microphone feed back, it’s a similar sound. This positions ‘Ricochet’ alongside Cancer Bats’ echoey ‘Searching For Zero’ or Letlive’s hopelessly over-compressed ‘The Blackest Beautiful’ – arguably great records ruined by intrusive, unpleasant production.
You can’t separate art from when it was made, it’s impossible, which makes it interesting that Rise Against, a band’s whose name literally describes their politics, chose to release an album of acoustic covers during the first Trump administration. You’d think they would have been seething with a desire to protest. However, their subsequent record ‘Nowhere Generation’ tapped into the general malaise of the disaffected middle-American Trump voter, most notably in its references to ‘Factories’; a smart and effective approach. ‘Ricochet’ would have been conceived and written during the Biden era, a time where the status quo was improving, but the perception was of things getting worse. Hence it arrives at the right time, the music feels angry and hopeful, while being vague enough to be inclusive; the ideal place to pitch themselves.
Check out these songs live and cross your fingers, thirty three years after its original release, the Beatles released ‘Let It Be… Naked’, a version of the album without the intrusive production, we can but hope.
‘Ricochet’ exists in an uncanny valley, it’s a strong, timely record with the unpleasant, false sheen of audio Botox.
IAN KENWORTHY
Ten albums into their career, Rise Against are ready for something new. To find new way to express themselves. Something fresh. They don’t want to become unrecognisable, but they do want to try something new. So they enlisted producer Catherine Marks, who has worked with St Vincent and Boygenius, not someone you might expect and that is reflected in the results; One, the band sounds absolutely energised. Two, that sound is… divisive.
Two, three or even four year album cycles, time is the advantage. The songs are always strong, they never feel rushed. This is the case here, in fact, it contains the strongest set of songs in years. It is the sound of a band refreshed and certainly the most aggressive since 2008’s ‘Appeal To Reason’ when Zak Blair joined on lead guitar, possibly ever. With its hard stops, ‘I Want It All’ is absolutely vicious, while ‘Forty Days’ is awkward, rough and one of the noisiest tracks they’ve committed to tape. The harmonic opening riff on ‘Damage Is Done’ is also wickedly propulsive and even the one time they revisit the mid-level rock sound that defines much of their recent output on ‘Us Against The World’ it absolutely seethes.
This is easily the band’s most interesting record too, while still maintaining a recognisable Rise Against sound and the electronic shuffle found on the title track is unlike anything they’ve tried before. It’s still powered by a buzzing bassline and feels familiar but offers a new approach. However, you cannot separate the songs from the way they are presented and the production does not suit the band, at all. At times, specifically on ‘Black Crown’, you understand what they’re going for; a swirly, druggy, shoegaze sound that feels extremely potent. However, a distinctive choice had been made, it’s an unusual choice but it’s also impossible to ignore, like making a delicate flavoured soup and then dumping in a bulb of garlic.
To be clear, the record does not have a ‘bad’ sound – Marks knows what she is doing – parts of it are amazing. The clean guitar tone for example is great. There are spaces for the instruments, often it’s powerful, crisp and there’s a bite to the harder songs, but it also sounds wrong. Not because melodic hardcore has to sound a certain way, but because the unconventional production does not suit the band’s rough edges. Parts of the sound are weird, making for an unpleasant overall sound. Often the songs are cluttered in strange ways and are combined with a soft, white-noisy edge. It is particularly unpleasant on ‘Sink Like A Stone’, which hisses like a busted amplifier and sounds genuinely ugly. And not, punk rock ugly either; celebrity, house on the Hollywood hills ugly. It’s a far cry from the honesty of their previous records. The question is who listened to this and thought it sounded good?
So, perhaps the best example of where things go wrong is the shimmery acoustic song ‘Gold Long Gone’ which is bathed in swirly beauty, except of course, it showcases the actual problem, Tim McIlrath’s voice sounds like crap. If you’re ever looking for the perfect title for a record ‘Ricochet’ is it. The definition is ‘a shot that rebounds off a surface’. That is exactly what is happening with the reverb smothering his voice, making him sound drunk, lackadaisical and often out of tune. It’s not auto-tuned or electronic but it has a tinny, distant, and echoey reflection that draws attention to the recording’s artifice. Now, this approach is probably ideal for an artist like St Vincent or a singer whose voice is soft enough to layer but McIlrath is presented with a strange, distant, buzzing sound that is deeply unpleasant and literally headache inducing. And, as he sits on top of the mix, you can’t avoid it.
Sure, there are people who don’t notice that voices are heavily compressed or auto-tuned or whatever but for the rest of us, it’s tinny, metallic, and sharp to the ears. If you’ve ever had a microphone feed back, it’s a similar sound. This positions ‘Ricochet’ alongside Cancer Bats’ echoey ‘Searching For Zero’ or Letlive’s hopelessly over-compressed ‘The Blackest Beautiful’ – arguably great records ruined by intrusive, unpleasant production.
You can’t separate art from when it was made, it’s impossible, which makes it interesting that Rise Against, a band’s whose name literally describes their politics, chose to release an album of acoustic covers during the first Trump administration. You’d think they would have been seething with a desire to protest. However, their subsequent record ‘Nowhere Generation’ tapped into the general malaise of the disaffected middle-American Trump voter, most notably in its references to ‘Factories’; a smart and effective approach. ‘Ricochet’ would have been conceived and written during the Biden era, a time where the status quo was improving, but the perception was of things getting worse. Hence it arrives at the right time, the music feels angry and hopeful, while being vague enough to be inclusive; the ideal place to pitch themselves.
Check out these songs live and cross your fingers, thirty three years after its original release, the Beatles released ‘Let It Be… Naked’, a version of the album without the intrusive production, we can but hope.
‘Ricochet’ exists in an uncanny valley, it’s a strong, timely record with the unpleasant, false sheen of audio Botox.
IAN KENWORTHY