With Grey Britain, South London hard-core quintet Gallows
unleashes a devastating screed against the stupider features of
21st-century English life, particularly the knife-happy, chip-stuffed,
binge-drinking, surveillance-crazed, sex-drunk, credit-maxed mentality
that plagues a once-sturdy people who withstood German air bombardment
during both world wars.
Vocalist Frank Carter certainly doesn’t put much stock in his fellow
Brits today, conjuring nightmarish images of vermin and disease as he
does in “London Is the Reason,” where “the bodies you thought would
never need graves / pave the streets of London town.”
As much as it is a sonic assault, Grey Britain is also a
literary vision of hell, with lyrics that boil over with the purest
vitriol. Check out “Crucifucks,” in which Carter shrieks that there’s
“no future for England’s sonsn/ they’re all 9-years-old and carry
guns.” This isn’t casual analysis, either; dude sounds like the issue
gnaws at him. Meanwhile, Carter’s brother Stephen and Laurent Barnard
team up and prove to be diabolical guitarists, fashioning riffs that
cut like switchblades one moment, then bludgeon like slaughterhouse
bolt guns the next.
Produced by GGGarth (Rage Against the Machine), Grey Britain reconfigures hardcore as an apocalyptic forecast, pushing the genre in
a darker-than-ever direction at a time when U.S. hardcore seems unsure.
Gallows doesn’t hesitate; neither should you. Listen to England’s death
rattle as interpreted by the most significant hard-core act around
right now.
This article appears in Jul 30 – Aug 5, 2009.
