No Help for the Mighty Ones

Contrary to what propagandists for the professions of brain surgery and rocket science would have you believe, the most difficult job thus far devised is that of the metal reviewer. Little are the reading public aware of the difficulty that goes into finding unused synonyms for the words ‘brutal’, ‘grim’ or ‘sludgy’, depending on whether you are reviewing death, black or, er, sludge metal respectively. Because even if band x and band y sound identical, the bloody tyrants won't let you submit the same review with the names changed. At least, that’s the bad kind of difficult. The good kind is when you have to think up a whole new set of adjectives to describe something which doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. That doesn’t happen very often, but enter SubRosa’s No Help for the Mighty Ones.

For those (including myself) that have so far missed them, the band come from Utah and present profoundly enigmatic music, flickering between the surprising bedfellows of sludge, folk, and art-rock. There are two relative rarities here in terms of instrumentation. The first is the clean female vocals, which often have a grungy understatedness to them but which are also capable of tight a capella harmonising as on the sweet rendition of the traditional folk song House Carpenter included here. The second is the violin which is an ever-present here and an integral component of the sound, rather than a curious augmentation intended to provide a shortcut to gothic sadness. Its effects are both textural- this permanent presence of taut fragility squalling above the band’s crumbling sludge guitars- and, of course, melodic. The latter is critical here, because this is an album that pulsates with melody, of a particular sort. Tracks like Behind Borrowed Time, Whippoorwill, or The Inheritance are strikingly chorus-oriented, with clunking but anthemic alt-rock hooks reminding me of some of the Smashing Pumpkins’s more tuneful numbers.

This adeptness with instrumentation and the singular genre-combination means this is a multifaceted album with a hell of a lot of depth to it. Don’t be misled by the importances of choruses to some tracks. No Help for the Mighty Ones is at times utterly despondent, drawing lyrical inspiration from such 300-page festivals of relentless misery as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (source material which is done ample justice), even if it is at other points radiant and uplifting. Melodic refrains coalesce like rays of sunlight slicing through the bleak thunderclouds which are an ever-present backdrop. Dark Country and Beneath the Crown, for example, have these fearsome, dissonant climaxes in which the violins assume a swooping, aggressive character and the guitars start to give way to crackling feedback. The latter is particularly menacing, beginning with a particularly deep and fuzzy two-note ostinato but building to a scratchy, freeform violin solo which hisses away as rare harsh vocals surface underneath.

It’s not a sound entirely without precedent, of course. The one act I keep coming back to as a comparison is Texas’s Giant Squid, who use similarly inventive instrumentation and who cultivate a comparably quirky aura. You could also easily point to echoes of Kylesa, certainly in the band’s heavier moments. But SubRosa defies and surpasses these reference points because its sound is such a nuanced and enigmatic one; the guitar tones have this crumbling timbre, growlingly distorted but assuming a washed out grace in conjunction with the other instrumentation. The riff that opens Whippoorwill, for example, is nothing but a classic doom squelcher, albeit one with a gliding 6/8 metre. But, those faded, insistent string glissandos and the almost childlike chanting of the vocals drench it in wistful melancholia. That depth of mood and subtlety of sound seem to be the story of the album. Ultimately this is essential listening for music fans in need of adventurously-minded metal.