Blame Shifters has the anger and excitement but plays a different sort of punk music. If I had to make a guess I would have placed the band in the U.K. and not U.S. The band mixes post punk elements with the real thing in ways that it almost becomes to hard to discern the line between the two.
Take 'Glory Mold' as an example. The band plays Franz Ferdinand like lead lines but louder, to all appearances but not necessarily really faster and backed by a raging storm of a rhythm section. Singer Mike Dunn really winds himself up, only to release the tension with some wild screaming. What will his kids think when they see him perform?, I can't help wondering. Despite the anger, just listen to how well the song is built up, with guitar melodies coming in from all sides. Blame Shifters really know what they are doing here. This is not about venting anger but presenting song and message in the best possible way. The soloing in the song that brought forth the title? Has that still got anything to do with punk? This is alternative rock in the best possible way.
To think that the band has gone through some deep valleys to get to where they are with Everyone Must Go. A founding member died during the pandemic, as did another friend Dunn started a band with in the past. He himself had a yearslong writer's block and with the death of Chris Simmons the band's other song writer left the building prematurely. Dunn and drummer Rob Furness had played together with Simmons since they were 15. Despite all the misery the band decided to continue anyway, together with "newby" Meagan Day, on bass since 2014, to come up with Everyone Must Go, an the energised punk album. Why they did get out of that valley and all that was left behind there, comes forward in the album's final song 'Keep It Going', a true introverted reflection song. "For both of them".
Of course Everything Must Go as a whole is loud, but allow yourself to listen through the loudness as it were and you will find how varied the album is. This is far from a "one, two, three, four, let's go hey ho" album. Some songs are cringing, cause discomfort or even have complex Frank Zappa styled interludes, where all play the same note/beat together. It's the pop element that is totally missing, making for very interesting listening sessions. The deeper I get into Everything Must Go, the more I discover and the more interesting the album becomes. At the same time the album is unpolished and rough at the edges. Beauty and poppunk is far from the minds of this trio.
Everything Must Go is a far more complex and good album than I'd gathered from the introduction. Giving it the time to ripen, it seems like it opened itself to me to show the inner beauty in all that rough and toughness.
Wout de Natris
You can listen to and order Everyone Must Go here:
https://blameshifters.bandcamp.com/album/everyone-must-go
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