My last review for Everything Is Noise was Chat Pile‘s acerbic new release Cool World, a brutal, violent attack on the decline of a nation, if not Western civilization. The band encapsulated the last decade of American life in an orgy of cacophony, music made for those who look at a warped world of hopelessness through shit-stained lenses. It’s a world where the bottom is so far down that there’s no hope of crawling your way back up to the top of the pit latrine. You’re just stuck, covered in shit, and you’ll probably get shit on more, as if wallowing in it wasn’t enough. In other words, it can always, always get worse.
High Vis is cut from the same thematic cloth as the OKC noise band, a group of young English punks who have been raging against the machine since 2019. And while High Vis clearly agree that this world has screwed the majority of its people to the proverbial wall, the band still thinks there’s hope that those nails can be pried out of our flesh. For Chat Pile, we’re doomed to suffer, so we might as well just accept our sordid fates. Their music wallows in despair and hopelessness, and while High Vis honors the despair, they still haven’t quite stopped hoping that there’s a way up to the top of the long-drop. We might be getting shit on, and we might still be covered in it, but there’s still hope that we can make our way out, clean ourselves off, and start anew. It’s a long-shot (much like the long-drop), but it’s a shot all of us should take. On their third album Guided Tour, the band rips a through a collection of powerful, hardcore-adjacent songs of hope for a world that seems more and more hopeless with every tick of the clock.
Take opener “Guided Tour,” for example. For a band whose lineage is firmly entrenched in the annals of British hardcore – Dirty Money and Tremors were both terrorizing local London pubs for a few years before singer Graham Sayle and drummer Edward “Ski” Harper teamed up to start High Vis – the song is a veritable timeline of 20th century Britpop, at times conjuring up the ringing guitars of Stone Roses. If there’s one thing the band knows, it’s that if we leave it up to the politicians and billionaires to be the decision-makers, there’s no hope for any of us. We’re in this together, and if you don’t have the desire to take a fist to the face of the fascist regime, then it might be time to get off the bus. ‘You’re desperate to feel more,‘ spits Sayle in his thick, effective Scouse accent. ‘For once in your life.‘ And for those of us who have a desire to feel something – anything – in the face of a society that continues to lull their sheep into a paralytic state of existence, High Vis is the jolt of adrenaline needed to leap off the operating table.
“Drop Me Out” is the sound of ripping out the IV lines, shedding the hospital gown, and running down the main thoroughfare. We may all be suffering from the same information overload syndrome, metaphorically hospitalized in a hospice that has no way out, but there are some who simply will their way through the pain and misery. The song has a ‘ride or die’ energy to it, at times sounding more like Japandroids than Japandroids ever did. The boys in High Vis are willing to ride along with you, but if you can’t see it through to the end, then just pull over, drop ’em off, and get the fuck out of the way:
‘Can’t pick your mates,Or your co-defendants.Time served,On this life sentence.I don’t play and I’ll never lose.Ride or die,It’s death for you.Drop me out, I’ll walk from here.‘
The band plays with such conviction and insistence, it would be hard not to run alongside them as they make a break for the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Drummer Harper and bass player Jack Muncaster provide a rhythmic backdrop throughout with workman-like precision. There’s nothing flashy about their playing, as if they dragged themselves home from a Yorkshire coal mine, covered in the dust of the industrial revolution, and pressed record. The guitars of Rob Hammerman and Martin MacNamara are a clinic in what modern guitar bands can sound like: they can alternate from a hardcore, punk rock intensity to a melodic, post-punk, new wave shimmer in the course of a couple of songs. It’s something a lot of modern English punk bands have mastered – think Fontaines D.C. or Crows at their best – but High Vis have managed to carve out a unique, compelling sound.
Much of this compulsion, if you will, comes from Graham Sayle’s remarkable vocal performance. Sayle would be the last one to consider himself a ‘good’ singer. There’s no vocal histrionics happening here, and none of the pathos of a Bono or Morrissey, but there’s such dedication to conveying the message of the lyrics that it becomes a rather mesmerizing experience. If the Guided Tour is about escaping to a better life, then Sayle is in the driver’s seat and his foot has that gas pedal pushed all the way down. And it’s down for the entire thirty-eight minutes.
A lot of this, as well, can take place during the course of one song. The guitars on “Feeling Bless” sound like 1990s Chapel Hill, with the melodic sense of Superchunk and the noisy guitars of Archers of Loaf. Throw in some delay-drenched guitars on the chorus, soak Sayle’s vocals in a bit of reverb, and you’ve got some early U2 in there (and I mean that in a good way). The song moves along a steady, mid-tempo pace, and Sayle’s vocals – once again – are shouted with such precise passion that it’s impossible to not to get wrapped up in the band’s shared vision:
‘The meter’s on so don’t be long.
Wash it up, it’s twice as strong.
Metallic smoke and sleepless dreams,
Your world, it just ain’t what it seems.
I’ve been waiting for you,
Because I want the same things too.
Are you feeling bless?‘
Aside from the furious punk rock energy of “Drop Me Out” and “Mob DLA” on the second half of the record (and the closer, which I’ll get to later), the rest of the songs that fill out the album veer in wildly different directions. None of this is more abrupt than the single “Mind’s a Lie” that was released back in July to promote the record. At first the song doesn’t even feel like it fits the narrative, particularly musically, of Guided Tour. Indeed, I had to check my phone to make sure it was the same band. Sayle’s earnest, throaty shout is certainly evident, but syncopated drums come across as rigid and electronic, and the guitars shine like the best guitar work from early ’80s British New Wave bands. Featuring sampled vocals from North London DJ Ell Murphy, the song has definite house energy, like a Technique-era New Order.
Lyrically, Sayle deals with mental illness and his government’s inability to address this issue with any fidelity. Like their compatriots across the pond, it seems mental illness is something that’s more likely to be swept under the rug of freedom and democracy, with lots of finger-pointing, thoughts, prayers and willful ignorance to shave off the rough edges along the way. Through this lens, it’s a pretty brilliant move on the band’s part: why not craft a song that’s so far off what they are expected to do that it comes across schizophrenic in it’s own sense of belonging? If I can look at my own phone with a WTF expression upon the first notes of Murphy’s melody, then how is that much different than how we look at the unhoused man on the street?
It’s the final song “Gone Forever” that really mashes up all the elements the band has brought on Guided Tour into one triumphant fist-pumping anthem of rage. The guitars are drenched in chorus, distorted and thick, dripping in fat. The sound is similar to that of Chat Pile‘s noise-driven axes, a sound that seems to have been dragged through decades of guitar-driven, angry rock and roll all the while avoiding the morass of ineffectual pop and soundbites that surround it. And like Chat Pile, High Vis uses these guitars to lay a foundation of hatred and despair in the face of hope and truth. After all, when your wit’s have been stretched to their frayed ends, what else is there for anyone to do? Don’t worry – Sayle has an answer for that, as well.
‘Prepared for peace,
And ready for war.
Take what you need,
If you can take anymore.
Pacifism is a privilege,
Pacifism is a privilege.
What do you do when you can’t take anymore?‘
What DO you do when you can’t take anymore? In Chat Pile‘s world, you just fucking give up. In High Vis‘s world, you kick the oppressors in the fucking balls. And even if that doesn’t work, at least you have the satisfaction that you tried. Guided Tour, in a sense, is the Lonely Planet guide for how to face up to what seem to be insurmountable challenges. Even if we find ourselves floundering around at the bottom of the cesspool, avoiding falling logs of societal shit, there’s still sun shining through the opening at the top – and as long as we can keep our eyes open, and a plot a path for the escape route, it’s that hope that will keep us moving forward. And High Vis, defiantly and emphatically, is all about moving forward.
