Employed To Serve are an ideal play-when-angry band. They are heavy as hell. Their lyrics have progressed from “everything sucks” – prevailing themes in Warmth of a Dying Sun and Eternal Forward Motion – to “everything sucks but we’re going to do something about it” in 2021’s Conquering.
And they seem extremely nice people as well. I experienced this first-hand at a Halloween gig they played in the back of a pub in leafy Surrey, England. Justine Jones, the vocalist, was dressed as a mermaid. The rest of the band – and a majority of the audience – were dressed in Aloha shirts. The reason for the fancy-dress theme was, they explained, apart from it being a day before Halloween, that they are sometimes mis-named on bills as Employed To Surf.
And in between boulders of metalcore guitars and blood-curdling howls of being force-fed views and motivational anti-suicide messages, they seemed genuinely humbled and grateful that the audience had not only made the effort on a weeknight, but they had enthusiastically adopted the dress code.
So it was with this experience in mind that I hoped that their latest album was good. After all, nobody wants to be negative to a nice person.
Thankfully, I don’t need to be. This album is great. There is more melody than we’ve been used to from the band – albeit there were inklings of tunefulness coming through on Conquering. And they have embraced wholeheartedly a host of late-90s and early noughties motifs, like keyboard beds, and juxtapositions of visceral verses and clean choruses. There is far less of the angular time signature changes as the band did in the past – this is more of a straightforward headbanger of a record. And as for an album highlight, that is too hard to pick – to paraphrase Emmet Brickowski from The Lego Movie, every track is awesome.
The nods to the past are particularly noticeable on the title track and ‘Atonement’, the latter of which features none other than Will Ramos of deathcore darlings Lorna Shore screeching in the background. Lyrically, as well as musically, ‘Atonement’ is very heavy. It is a first-person account of a coercive relationship, twisted by the fact that Jones barks the punchline “If I can’t have you no-one can”, to which Sammy Unwin, the guitarist and vocalist replies “remove your hands from round my throat”.
But Fallen Star is not a baggy-shorts-and-baseball-caps nostalgia-fest. It is an in-your-face boulder of heaviosity, with immensely satisfying breakdowns and thrash-influenced mosh-a-ramas, like on ‘Now Thy Kingdom Come’, which channels the best bits from old-school Bay-Area thrash, even down to a shredding guitar solo, and blends it up with modern down-tuned, neck-wrecking metalcore.
And the production is thoroughly modern, crisp, clean and suitably separated. The production quality was even discernible from the dreadful stream-only copy that the record company gave us. And now that I am on the subject, stream-only copies are a curse. It is a practice which treats the reviewer, and by extension, the fan, like children. Reviewers are far more likely to get grumpy at a password-protected bad-quality stream that cuts out and buffers at most inopportune moments than they are to share a file of passable MP3 files. Seriously. It is only a small step from stream-only review copies to Metallica’s St Anger-era exclusive listening sessions, as portrayed on Some Kind of Monster. And nobody wants to go back to the St Anger era.
Sorry, I digress (and, as an aside, this album was the ideal soundtrack to me typing out the above furious diatribe).
There are two more guest vocalists to mention – Serena Cherry from Svalbard, on ‘Last Laugh’, which almost sounds radio friendly until the vocals kick in. And Jesse Leach of Killswitch Engage pops up on ‘Whose Side Are You On’, which flips from full-on thrash to breakdowns that could cause injury if not handled correctly.
The last two tracks are a two-pronged manifesto for a positive mental attitude. The final track, ‘From This Day Forward’ delivers slogans such as “I won’t accept ignorance as bliss, I won’t accept cowardice” to a martial beat.
‘Renegades’, which precedes it, is the closest you’re going to come to a feel-good metalcore track – and chimes with the band’s ethos of “heavy metal unity” (basically that a metal gig attracts all manner of outsiders, but all of whom look out for each other) . The verse is an excellent mid-tempo rager, but the chorus, sung cleanly by Sammy, could either be a thank-you to their forebears or to fans contorting themselves in a sea of twisted limbs at a gig: “You’re the reason for the strength that we feel,” he croons, as we all go “aww, you’re the best”. Then Justine growls “We. Fight. Through the darkest days. We. Are. The renegades.” Renegades they may well be, but they are very friendly ones – and ones that can create a damn good racket as well.
