Blog On The Motorway

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with twitterthon hero Diary Of A Ledger, the idea being every week one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for.  This week it’s my turn again, and my response to Gray’s last suggestion, which he referred to as his ‘break-up’ album.

The bastard offspring of the original grit of NuMetal and the burgeoning post-hardcore scene (that one you now know as Emo) Glassjaw’s debut album had a huge and profound effect on me when it hit just before the turn of the century. 

I had just come out of  a relationship, and while it hadn’t ended particularly badly, it had left a bitter taste in the mouth.  I needed something to cleanse the palette, and in this album I found just the thing, an album of pure undiluted bile and teenage angst.

Musically, this album is not so much reintenting the wheel as giving it a new tyre, refining the work laid out by the likes of Far, Quicksand and the Deftones. Quiet/loud dynamics, beefy riffs moulded to big epic choruses. Very well done but nonetheless not exactly groundbreaking.

What makes this album stand out though, is the lyrical content and vocal delivery of Daryl Palumbo.  The album’s producer, Ross Robinson, always had a reputation for getting great angsty performances from his vocalists, but in Daryl he found someone whose pain shone through as being so authentic and believable, yet so melodious, that it works as a sucker-punch to the gut.

Lyrically, there’s not a lot to separate Daryl’s lyrics from the bad poetry of a thousand teenage boys in subject matter. These are dark and sometimes verging on the misogynistic rants against the woman who stole his heart (and by the sounds of it put it through a paper shredder before feeding it to her cat) but Daryl balances the sheer rage with flashes of a dark humour which balances out the sheer venom.

But the delivery, in which Daryl goes from sweet and epic to gutteral howls of pain in the time it takes most vocalists to take a deep intake of breath. At times you can hear him trying to fight back tears, most notably on the album’s shining moment, the title track, where Daryl pours out his heart about his struggles with Crohn’s disease and times in and out of hospital as a child.

In case the listener is left with any doubt as to the point of the album, the closing track ‘Hotel Of the White Locust’ is the most venemous yet, as Daryl takes final aim at the woman who I imagine found this rather a difficult album to listen to. “Wipe off your mouth. Get up off your knees and make me your god.” And then, the storm is over.

Or seems to be, as the calming repetition of Daryl saying “Pack your shit and leave, and take my memories of her with you.” gives way to a simple and understated piano line.  Daryl’s voice comes back, clearly close to tears, and, sounding more like Elliott Smith than anything else.  The lyrics that follow are simple and haunting, but convey a very sweet sense of remorse at having been so brutal.

“And now you leave me in defeat
Leave me a battered, broken man.
The amount of love you wish to give is more than I can stand.

Now I have you where I want you
I know that you are listening
This is my chance to tell you everything

My chance to tell you I love you
But I’ve waited too long
Now the record’s over
Now the record’s over”

Brutal and elegant, this album takes me to a raw and emotional place. What more can you ask for?

4/5

Now go see what Gray thought of it!