An exciting new band who aim to exchange Gold for the price of silver! New post time!

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Good Morning! I am Jacob Braybrooke and I am typing up about your daily track on the blog – as per usual – because it is always my day-to-day pleasure to write about a different piece of music every day! Not to be confused with a breed of Gorillas of the same name, Silverbacks are a new 5-piece indie rock band from Dublin, Ireland. The group have been making strong waves stateside and internationally, with their D.I.Y. rock sound that harkens back to the taut rhythm drive of late-70’s Indie Punk, while incorporating a NYC Synth-Punk style reminiscent of LCD Soundsystem, and paying tribute to the quintessential New York sound with a discordant element of No-Wave. They have been working with Girl Band bassist Daniel Fox, as a producer, on their debut album, “Fad”, which has garnered critical acclaim since it’s release in mid-July of this year, via Central Tones. Fun fact, the band were supposed to play a gig at my local venue of The Sugar Mill in Stoke-On-Trent back in May, and I was planning on going to check them out because I had heard of them before, but well… We all know how that turned out! Let’s just check them out now, instead – with “Dunkirk” – below.

Ireland has become somewhat of a signature area in the development of an emerging guitar sound, with the ascending popularity of aggressive Indie Punk outfits like Fontaines DC, The Murder Capital and Bambara, a market of which I get the sense that Silverbacks are tapping into with “Dunkirk”, but they stand up to these acts with their comparatively more melodic pull, as they are also trying to quietly sneak into the NYC No-Wave revival scene. The track, lyrically, is a dystopian re-imagining of the events of the Battle Of Dunkirk in 1940, with Daniel O’ Kelly using snarky hooks like: “A safety pin right through the ear/40 years of manhood” and “Swinging arms, Beating commuters on the tarmac beaches of Dunkirk” to rhythmically bring things up to date with the exploration of masculinity and domestic-ism as themes. An “every punk trick in the book” signals a knowing nod to a churning Bass guitar hook that takes the steady Lead guitar hook to a more fiery place and creates a rougher energy, to counteract the cleaner production style used in the verses. The chorus explores the idea of the Dunkirk beaches now being a holiday resort for the OAP crowd, with a sarcastic undertone of couples in failing marriages in similar vein to The Sex Pistols’ “Holiday In The Sun”, as his vocals grow in disorientation and precedes a high-pitched interlude. The delivery has a Drone quality to it, and the guitar riffs remain to be driven by intellect. The tension gets calmed down by an upbeat bass guitar riff that comes out of nowhere, forming up a Math-Rock inspired outro that suprised me as a listener, and deviates from the D.I.Y. punk style that it was building towards at a gradual place. Overall, the guitar work feels impressive and the sound pays off in challenging the conventions of a typical indie punk act. I probably wouldn’t choose to listen intently to it, as I’ve never been a part of the musical world it’s catering towards and it mainly washes over me quite a bit, which makes it quite difficult for me to feel that I can judge a record like this. For what it is worth, however, I think they’re a stronger part of the popular new Irish punk scene, but it is sadly not a sound that I’m really into – it’s just not “my thing”. But, I feel it is technically good, and worth a listen.

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Thank you for reading today’s blog post! Tomorrow marks the signal for a new weekly edition of Scuzz Sundays, the time of the week where we take a look back at an Emo-Rock or a Pop-Punk relic from between the late-1990’s and the mid-2000’s. Shockingly, we’ll be celebrating the one-year anniversary of the feature with an in-depth look back at a terrible tune that was a predominant part of the Scuzz TV era… But most fans probably would not have it any other way! If you really liked what you just read, why not follow the blog to get notified when every new daily post is up and why not like the Facebook page here?: https://www.facebook.com/OneTrackAtATime/