To listen to the new release by Chicago outfit Gunner’s Daughter is to clamber into Doc Brown’s DeLorean, punch ‘ANY DAY IN ABOUT 2001’ into the LED display and put the pedal to the metal. Whether by accident or design, this is a record which so strongly evokes the early-00s emo scene that I genuinely had to double-check the release date to make sure I’d got the right album.
The muted production, the marriage of generic punk-rock guitars to grunge dynamics and slightly-flat, angst-ridden vocals summons nostalgic memories of albums like Grade’s Under the Radar and , to a lesser extent, Thursday’s Full Collapse. In fact like both of those classics this could have been released fifteen years ago by Victory Records and probably would have been, had it been made fifteen years ago.
That’s not to say that The Flowers and the Earth is a bad album, or that there’s anything wrong with a band wearing their influences not so much on their sleeve as having them printed on Global Hypercolor t-shirts which change colour every time a dark, emotional vocal is half-sung, half-spoken over a minor chord. The problem here lies with the songs.
Gunner’s Daughter seem like a band straddling a ravine between homage and pastiche. The Flowers and the Earth has some beautiful instrumental melodies and employs the kind of creative use of harmonics and feedback which were so prevalent back before Tony Brummel started signing bands like Design the Skyline. It even has some memorable hooks – particularly Foreword’s “We’ve all experienced love, we’ve all experienced loss” – which will wedge themselves in your head after one listen but I’d be hard pushed to recommend any single track as ‘stand-out’. The overtly-sincere spoken-word segments start to grate after a while too but that, of course, is a matter of personal preference.
The other problems I had with this album were its repetitive lyrics, its repetitive lyrics and its repetitive lyrics. OK, obvious joke is obvious but there’s so much of it on display here that you have to wonder whether the band forgot to take the whole lyric sheet into the studio and had to spread one song’s worth of verbiage across several tracks. Sure, repetition can serve to enhance or enforce a song but in many cases here Gunner’s Daughter take it to the point of exasperation; seemingly an attempt to create sing-along mantras but without any kind of crescendo or melodic development.
Musically, The Flowers and the Earth has some great moments and is definitely worth a listen. There’s undeniably interesting post-hardcore influenced guitar work which any fan of 1990s Victory-style bands will appreciate, but it harks back so strongly to the bands who influenced it that it’s hard not to wonder just what exactly the point is.