Source: Album Artwork
When you think of good-old fashioned British Industrial rock music, you think of driving, violent riffs and aggressive, sexy vocals. Well, with This Be The Verse you get all of that, and a hell of a lot more. Don’t get us wrong, bands like Nine Inch Nails, Dillinger Escape Plan and Queens of the Stone Age have paved the way for This Be The Verse, and it would be hard to listen to their self-titled debut album without being reminded of these rock giants and their influences, but TBTV have taken it a few steps further.
The thing about This Be The Verse is that you really don’t know what you will be listening too next. That does sound like a cliché, and a lot of the times when referring to albums, it definitely is, but in this case there’s no other way to describe it. One minute, you’ll be listening to aggressive opener ‘Stubborn Youth’, which kicks off with off-beat drumming and gravelly, dark vocals, and the next minute you’ll be mesmerised by hypnotic electronic samples and impressive vocal harmonies in ‘Adieu’. It’s not even just from track-to-track, even within tracks there are some pretty unpredictable twists and turns. You’ll be expecting a brutal breakdown, but instead what you’ll get is a funky bassline and some pretty out-of-character vocals. But then, nothing is that out-of-character with these guys.
Although this rollercoaster of an album can feel a bit bewildering at times, it’s really interesting to hear, and more importantly very effective. It’s refreshing to see the band, who have only been together for two years, to try a lot of different things, and for everything to work pretty well. ‘Alone’ is an example of a track that you probably won’t hear on any other album. There’s barely a trace of guitar or bass in this track, and the music is provided completely by drums and electronically. The vocals are particularly haunting in this slower track, and it shows a range of vocals that would impress anyone.
The themes of the album are centred on social conventions and religion. You might guess from album closer ‘I am Charlie’ that TBTV aren’t a massive fan of religion, and we imagine you’d probably be right. It’s hard not to get that impression in a song that calls religion ‘…full of shit…’, ‘…fake…’ and ‘…cancer…’ before breaking into a violent, heartfelt chant including the lyrics ‘Fuck religion’.
The production on this album is both a positive and a negative point. It is clear that this has been produced to the highest quality, but due to the gritty nature of the band and the genre, some of the raw, underground vibe has been lost. It is very well polished, and it’ll be really interesting to see how the band perform tracks on this album live. It might bring back some of that industrial sound that they seem to lack.
This is a very impressive debut album from a band who have gone from strength-to-strength over the short time they have been together. This Be The Verse are flexing their muscles on this album, and it’s clear they are out to make a name for themselves. If they keep this up, they just might.
