It would be somewhat of an understatement to say that shouty South London DIY stalwarts SILENT FRONT have had a bit of a fairly mixed time over the past twelve months or so.
After seventeen years of super sweaty adventures around basement gigs, all dayers and other assorted smelly venues all around Europe Silent Front had decided it was time to call it quits. The plan was to record one last album, play a short European tour and then ride off into the sunset to allow their ruined eardrums to recover.
All was going swimmingly until as they were en route to play their Paris show they were involved in a monster high speed motorway wreck that destroyed their van and left multiple members of the touring party with a host of sickening injuries. Drummer Gareth (who also plays guitar in MAYORS OF MIYAZAKI and USA NAILS) suffered a broken neck and Matt from SLY AND THE FAMILY DRONE and BRUXA MARÍA broke multiple bones and suffered a collapsed lung.
Just to administer yet another hefty boot to the balls while Silent Front were down they then discovered that while their van had been towed to a supposedly secure location after the crash, somehow from there all their gear had went missing. Yeah…. right you are. In a secure lock up, with CCTV cameras all around the area, somehow an entire van load of musical equipment including speaker cabinets that require a minimum of two people to lift them was all magicked out the back door and nobody saw a thing?
Literally everything they owned was stolen by the thieving reptilian scumbags from the yard and has as yet remained unrecovered.
If there is any room for a small amount of sugar mixed in with the shite then it’s in this epic swan song of a last recording, Three. Recorded at Bear Bites Horse Studios in south London they’re finally managed to resolve the one outstanding problem I always had with Silent Front recordings in that they didn’t really accurately capture the soup like density and epic heft of the live performances.
Possessing one of the tightest and most driving rhythm sections around in the British underground music scene the bass and drums sound positively monstrous, snarling and pounding along like some kind of specialist precision machinery. The guitar lines teeter from skittering and sparse single note runs to gigantic meaty riffs in the blink of an eye all the while the vocals switch between harrowing red raw throaty yelling and surprisingly soft almost whispery sections before exploding back into fury and rage again.
One of the most under appreciated and under deployed skills in noisy guitar bands is the ability for your vocalist to not sound like either an utter twat teenager throwing a temper tantrum and refusing to do their homework or a comedy creatine inflated dicksplash threatening to kick the worlds ass in a fit of small dicked virginal rage. Silent Front take a bow, your vocalist Phil is clearly neither of these things and instead sounds like he’s been brushing up on the back catalogues of the rosters of labels like Touch and Go and Amphetamine Reptile.
GOOD SHIT!
If you dig bands like Unsane, Tad, or Scratch Acid then not only are you my kind of people but there’s more than a good chance you’ll be all over this album like a hungry hobo on a free lunch.
Get some.
x