“Don’t tell me what I cannot be.”
Those words might have washed over me had I not been at a conference at my proper job last week where a chap gave moving testimony about three of his friends who had committed suicide after being told by teachers they’d never amount to anything because of their autism.
It must be fate, I guess that this was the hook line for “What I Cannot Be”, the opening track on “Greyscale.”
Loosely you can call it “hardcore” but, it is heavy as hell and Darko have never been ones to accept your neat box, anyway.
They do though, sound remarkably angry here. Rightly so. If you’re not angry then you’re wrong. On “Built On Broken Backs”, they begin “the fight against these parasites” and appear to yell “world war stories, fuck off Tories” at one point. That might be me.
New singer Tom West is an astonishingly varied vocalist. I don’t normally go in for guttural growls, but he does them superbly on the post-hardcore-tinged “Aggro” and the incredibly raw and visceral “AUX II”.
As if to prove that they don’t see why they should conform, it ends with not only the longest but most accessible thing. “Lowest Hanging Fruit” has a different vibe to the rest, but it’s not about to conclude with anything like a happy ending. There is no silver lining here. Just shades of grey.
And oddly, it’s not just the anger, but also the shades and textures that make “Greyscale” so interesting. The new era has got itself off to a fine start.
Rating 8/10
