Few who saw Gallows with Frank Carter as their frontman will ever forget it: a mob electrified with the spirit of hardcore denizens Black Flag but also possessing a definitively British swagger, live they were a joyous punch in the face, their multi-tattooed singer part barbed wire, part Molotov cocktail.
Carter left in 2011 to form Pure Love, a project in which he got to sink his teeth into a more orthodox, hook-friendly populism that won him many new friends and formed a pointed riposte to those that would typecast a man unwilling to sit in anyone’s box. Seemingly restless, as that cycle ended we’re blessed with this identity in The Rattlesnakes, a vehicle in which the now thirty something has hinted he’s found a new peace and confidence.
If his relatively scarce interviews are to be believed the famously unrepentant – and much loved – anti-hero is using Modern Ruin to exorcise demons from a recent past in which he’d decided to quit music after Pure Love failed to gain the industry grease he’d hoped for. Lead single Lullaby may be about his daughter Mercy Rose, but in musical terms it’s a brash, glam-punk romp, the splinters and howl that used to be his distinctive howl are more nuanced and well..nicer.
Not that the subject matter is a walk up sunshine mountain; realised from both his biographical standpoint and with senses overloaded with the paroxysms of life as we know it, he recasts the strife with an omnipresent stare. As with much of the rest of this new work, it’s evident that the bite of Gallows‘ visceral debut Orchestra Of Wolves has finally, invigoratingly returned.
The environment is as predictably unforgiving as the man is of himself. The central player in Snake Eyes is one who sinks bottles to gain absolution from their bloody mistakes – but instead of redemption they’re pummelled by suffocating riffs, a newly refound sense of the tension-fed grist which so fascinated us about Carter’s fractured world in the first place. The kindling is there: Vampires reminds us that underneath his old band’s ferocity was craft, in itself a trojan horse of a song, pop in a broad sense, whilst Acid Veins and Thunder are more rugged and attritional, the sort of in-your-face trips the listener might expect from a songwriter rarely afraid to drown his meaning in allegories or blank misdirection.
There was never any doubt, of course, about the sincerity of anything the now former tattooist said, more with Pure Love a little niggle about the way he said it. Modern Ruin’s finale takes the listener unflinchingly inside his mind within its bleakest of phases: the title track is as brittle and aggressive as Abandon Ship or In The Belly Of a Shark, like the moment after which the dog bite starts to hurt, whilst the apocalyptic closer Neon Rust is slowed down, stripped bare, a Guns & Roses guitar smothered in sink estate madness, frustration and little dooms. It’s arguably his finest work.
That’s the dichotomy of stealing from your Id., the simplest, most complex, most sanctifying, least validated method of creating art from the psycho-tropical maze of dreams. Out of the industry, out of love with music, battered and bruised, many people would have retreated from the wreckage and called it even. Good for us then that Carter treated that period of his life as one huge exercise in therapy, of which Modern Ruin mines the snarling, alpha vein that he’s been stabbing for creatively for more than half a decade – and found again now in spades.
It’s definitely now time to start talking to Frank once more.
