The people who created rock n’ roll should’ve seen it coming. Sure, your Chuck Berrys and Little Richards were nice suits and had their hair slicked back while doing splits and duck walks on stage. But, the moment they began a tradition of singing in front of people about what regular people go through, they unleashed something which was only going to end up with musicians spilling their guts through guttural screams in front of an audience.
It only makes sense that things would play out this way. There’s so little of the world that is presented to us that is real. Regular people aren’t deemed important or stable enough to be told the truth. That’s why, in this day and age, the emotional sucker punch of hardcore and of bands like GLIDEEE is more important than ever.
Strictly speaking, GLIDEEE is a Lebanese post-hardcore band that doesn’t just invent its own way of spelling things, but also a compendium of personal emotions, most of them tortured and born out of extreme angst. New album, “KINETIC FLAW”, the kind of collection of songs that, should you play them for your father, he’ll tell you turn it off, and then go seek it out herself and try to decipher it with a glass of gin in hand.
The key to the band’s sound is its ferocious attack, and the gentleness at the heart of each, which they try to keep hidden. Take a listen to the opening track, “NEPOTISM AT HEART,” where the singing, at times, resembles an air raid siren that is only shut off momentarily by tender, arpeggiated guitar lines.
Meanwhile, “INHALER” makes ample use of both feedback noise and punchy, indie rock riffs, while describing something akin to a news broadcast-created panic attack. And, “MIGRAINE GREEN,” with its spoken word parts, ends up sounding like the observation of either a serial killer or some ever-watching deity.
The best thing about GLIDEEE is the thing that helps make the best hardcore bands hard to resist. The band plays like there’s nothing further down the line, no work in the morning and no reason to conserve energy.
Where does it all leave us? A little less tired with the state of the world and just a tad less tense. “SUPERTASTEUR,” the catchiest, most immediate composition on the record, is that hopeful touch in the midst of all the chaos, the realisation that the ship will reach land despite the horrible storm outside. It was inevitable that rock music could still elicit both anxiety and hope.
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