The Blackout Argument – Detention (EN)

Though you never had to fear for the German music scene, let’s admit: Boney M scared everyone who had put their faith in the innovative electronics of Kraftwerk, or in the experimental, avant-garde rock music of the krautrock wave. But it wasn’t easy to be born in the 70s (the Breakfast Club also says so) and nowadays such bands break through from the shadow of Rammstein that are succesful not just because of their famous German accuracy but because of their creativity (which is unsaid by the stereotypes). Europe’s engine contributed to several genres: in metalcore we can think about Caliban and Heaven Shall Burn, in metal Deadlock and Neaera, in screamo June Paik and Petethepiratesquid, but the names of Radare or Bohren & der Club of Gore can remind us of pleasant melodies, too. And for 1-2 years a German band is considered to be one of the ensigns of post-hardcore: The Blackout Argument.

These young and astonishingly commited guys have been playing music together in their recent lineup just since 2009, before that a few change of members and the search for the right direction had kept them from breaking throuch which happened with the songs of Remedies. You can put that album right next to classics like After the Eulogy or Tomorrow Come Today as easily as you can put the farewelling record of Crime in Stereo next to the latest Brand New album: there were obvious similarities, but the album’s mature dynamism, and its fading away from hardcore while keeping elements of it left no place for plagiarism charges. With Detention the guys’ obvious goal was to demonstrate: they wanted to prove that this lineup is definite, flawless and that they can repeat the standards of Remedies, moreover they can overshadow it, and they did everything for the sake of the cause.

At first they started with a generally less important, but here and now essential coefficient: the conception. Remedies had a seemingly non-sense, plant-therapy backstory, and compared to that the change was huge and extraordinarily positive: the guys centered their work around one of the biggest 80s classics, the Breakfast Club. You can catch on the references in the lyrics, in the samples, but it’s right there on the cover, in the promo text, in the booklet, in their approach: for my greatest pleasure the guys in BOA discovered the deeper meaning under the teen drama surface of this Hughes classic, and they formed it to themselves (since you can match a five-piece to the main characters, it wasn’t hard to find a Brain, a Recluse, a Rebel or a Jock, however I let the search for the Beauty to the opposite sex). But the music is the deal: we can listen to fourteen songs again, though no intro this time, and they open with six songs of their best, all of them remind me of the finest moments of Remedies. Dynamic, heavy but catchy, characteristically melodic pieces, which don’t change tempo all the time, but you can easily differentiate heavier, harsher and softer tracks. Andrew Neufeld, who recently had a post-hardcore project, Sights & Sounds, makes a guest appearance in the no. 3 Satisfying Angst, and he gets just enough time to put the crown on the top of this excellent song. Songs like High Treason on Your Own or Fine Feathers Make Fine Birds rapidly became favorites, each of the musicians build perfectly a unique, recognisable sound and an own world of melodies, while Raphael delivers excellent vocal melodies and screams, and he has a pinch of Nathan Gray’s lethargy in his voice though it’s hard to notice this grayness (haha, what a clever word play, this band makes my mind shine) when he rips his chords out during the well-timed breakdowns.

Unfortunately a series of weaker songs starts with Versus the Northern Wind, and it’s rude to say, but these are kind of filler ones, and by having a similar build-up, they slur a bit. Untold Memoirs is the track which puts everything back to its place, and then Call the Tiny Sister’s Dog opens cleverly with a piano intro to help us enter the final third of Detention (nice to see that a hungarian dude plays on the black and white keys). It was pretty surprising that the guys left two of their trumps for the end of the album, so if they had decided to cut out those three songs from the middle of it, Detention would have been presented as the AOTY, but this way their „only” benefit is to give us a great closure: the often said slogan of the band pops up in the refrain of Overweight Against Heart Attacks, and its hardcore-like „anthemity”, lovely riffs, and feature by a German rapper, Casper work in an awesome way. At the end, in At Daggers Drawn With Life they make a last reference to the Breakfast Club, and they play themselves off from the playlist.

Detention is one of the most important albums of the year even with its slips, no question about that: their boysetsfire-rooted (they’re going to play in Budapest this summer), very unique music easily ruffs all those melodic metalcore albums out there. They mix clean vocals with rough verses in a much more accurate, deliberate, far better way than their american colleagues. It’s a pity that they wanted to meet all their obligations so badly that they overdid the album a little bit and didn’t sorted out a few tracks, but even with a few not-so-good minutes it resulted in an incredibly energetic album which is full of hits and which has only one flaw: that these guys love making music to a fault. And I will not tell them off because of it.

8/10