Frank Carter settles in a place all of his own.
If punk rock has always been looked at by those in the straight world as a place for outsiders, what happens when one of its icons chooses to become the outsider themselves?
A musical force of nature, as the lead singer of Gallows, Frank Carter was the singer in a band that briefly threatened to take hardcore overground via their debut album Orchestra Of Wolves; four years later and disenchanted with the scene from which he’d came, he declared himself out of everything and formed Pure Love with The Hope Conspiracy guitarist Jim Carroll.
Now fronting The Rattlesnakes along with Dean Richardson, the diminutive firebrand has revealed that the partial inspiration for their fifth album was the inability of others to let go – both of Gallows, who are currently on an extended hiatus – and of him as a raging, spit-in-the-face archetype he feels he never was.
Dark Rainbow follows its predecessor Sticky after three years in which the duo mused over whether to make another album at all. Written during lockdown and featuring the likes of Joe Talbot and Bobby Gillespie, Sticky was a waspish, hedonistic blur of a record but this latest effort, with Carter now sober again and both he and Henderson recalibrating through therapy, has a confidence and maturity that comes with self-realisation. It’s also definitely not a hardcore album.
If any further evidence were needed then listeners can dial into Man Of The Hour, a treatise on modern rock stardom, a song that questions whether such a thing exists when AI and a phone can make anyone famous. Fighting preconceptions (‘You want who you heard about/You want all the acting out’), it’s equally as bolder flag-planting-in-the-field-of-mainstream-rock as the pair have ever written, provocation dialled down and in tone beckoning in rather than shutting out the audience.
Some might be thinking: is this that guy from before? The one who, when talking about Brambles, refers to ‘neural pathways’? True, it’s a number which at least has a four-bar thrash out, but otherwise the essence is kept almost spectral, veiled, an attempt perhaps to try flicking different switches in our brains than we might expect.
At least some of this new perspective has fed directly from the realisation that the individual worth has to be recognised first before you can be independent in any setting. Carter addresses the issue in typical head on fashion during Self Love, a nonetheless piece of smart alt-pop despite its treatise on practising validation before diving into risk.
Whilst that’s an interesting diversion, the core of this record has a sombre grace which is both unexpected and also hints at a talent not yet at full levels of realisation. It’s an icy peak too: Queen Of Hearts is a desolate ballad employing a gently strummed guitar and empty room piano, the musing of a relationship about to go dark.
Following on, Sun Break Golden Happening is, if anything, even more within itself, emotionally bound up and skeletal, any overload of rock n’ roll left abandoned to those who still want it.
This new incarnation, predictably, is incomplete, meaning the likes of American Spirit and the quiet-loud closer A Dark Rainbow are fragmentary half-way houses. But even given that, Dark Rainbow’s intent is clear enough from any perspective; here are outsiders who’ve given up on finding a place to be that’s anywhere other than where they want to exist.
From screecher to crooner, Frank Carter’s now happy to be his own kind of rebel.
