Album Review: Tigercub - 'The Perfume Of Decay'
Tigercub: Vampiric, colossal, riff-heavy alt-rock fury in most recent contribution ‘The Perfume of Decay’.
Brighton alt-rock three-piece Tigercub are a band that captured my attention from the outset with ‘Omen’, a fuzzy noise-rock single that would eventually find its way onto 2016 debut album ‘Abstract Figures in the Dark’, moving Tigercub from a band with a handful of singles spanning two years and one EP, to a band already sonically established by their first album. Alongside other gems like ‘Burning Effigies’, ‘Memory Boy’ (a song that still finds its way onto their live set even seven years later), ‘Control’ and ‘Serial Killer’, ‘Abstract Figures...’ has stood the test of time as a raucous, fuzz-fueled effort, with a remarkable thematic consistency standing in clear contrast to their handful of impressive, though isolated, singles and EP. Several years later, with five singles spanning that time to ensure the name Tigercub doesn’t leave the collective alt-rock consciousness, and the outfit emerges with ‘As Blue as Indigo’. Apart from my initial hailing of the album as album-of-the-year material, it made me start to realise how Tigercub have evolved their explosive sound. With ‘As Blue as Indigo’, you have the essence of the sound and song craft they developed in their debut, now altogether filtered through cranked amplifiers, dense guitar and bass distortion, blistering drumming, and a unique sense of melody and guitar composition, with the riff work of frontman Jamie Hall taking a front seat. ‘Beauty’, ‘Stop Beating on My Heart (Like a Bass Drum)’, ‘Sleepwalker’ and ‘In the Autumn of My Years’ are absolute highlights in this regard.
Move forward two years, two more raging singles in the form of ‘I.W.G.F.U’ and ‘Overload’ as an Amazon Music original, a signing to indie label Loose groove Records (famously the label that signed Queens of the Stone Age in 1998) under the keen watch of Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard and a remark by Gossard himself that “Tigercub step up to claim the front runner status as the new heavy” and the hype machine is now travelling very deliberately at near supersonic speeds. But where does this album take Tigercub’s furious sound?
If you thought the heavy distortion couldn’t get any nastier, the riff work more an integral foundation of each song, and the subject matter anymore macabre, then you’ll find this album will have you muttering to yourself how wrong you were. The album, nearly from top to bottom, is a staggeringly brutal alt-rock contribution, trading out delicately nocturnal, midnight-graveyard verses with crushing riffs and choruses, teetering ever so gracefully between alt-rock and metal. The loud-quiet dynamic is something that the band have taken quite seriously here, and at most points Jamie Hall’s vocals and accompanying band harmonies are softly spoken, a haunting contrast to the crippling, wall-shaking instrumental displays on show here. The bass guitar acts as the low-end brother to the electric guitar performances, however in quieter melodic passages the bass is allowed some room to breathe and shine through the mix. Likewise, the drums move effortlessly between delicate and soft to deafening and thunderous, and the technical abilities of all members of the band are continuously on display.
The album opens with ‘Dirge’, a simple yet effective thirty-one seconds of droning distortion and feedback, giving swiftly away to album title single ‘The Perfume of Decay’. Arguably the most ‘metal’ sounding out of the entire album, the track opens with thick, distorted bass guitar, which then gives way to a seemingly never-ending electric guitar run straight out of some nightmarish, hell scape fairground ride, snaking viciously around colossal drums. It's well and truly a guitar line that should be taught to kids who think they have the guitar down, and adults for that matter. The verses act as momentary refrains from the song’s chaos with steady, sludgy palm-muted guitar and bass and Jamie’s haunted vocals, broken spuriously with that same introductory guitar line. This gives way to a chorus of crushing guitars, crashing drums, and Jamie’s now howling vocals. Other highlights include a surprisingly fuzzed-out guitar solo, something I thought broke the heavy distortion of the song up quite effectively. Next up is ‘Show Me My Maker’, a song I found as more a straight down the line alt-rock effort, with an admittedly massive riff the guitar and bass play in unison, with distorted bass carrying it in the verse solely. It’s also a riff which dominates nearly the entire song, save the glittering pre-choruses, which allow the song to not remain entirely riff oriented. In a similar vein, second single tease ‘Play My Favourite Song’ is split it into three veins of consistent riff heaviness between verse, pre-chorus and chorus, with screeching guitar leads snaking their way into the choruses and dedicated solo section. In both tracks I immediately reckoned they would be the most accessible to a general audience. I got flickers of Royal Blood levels of riffage, and while both tracks certainly got my head bouncing, I knew there was a more distinctly Tigercub brand of guitar work on the horizon. With ‘Swoon’, the third and final single teaser for this latest album, you have exactly that. Returning to that loud-quiet dynamic again, the song is split between morose, nocturnal verses punctuated with gritty guitar palm muting, only to then explode with glitchy guitar noise, driving bass and thudding drums, an altogether surprising first chorus. In fact, this first chorus tricks you into thinking the other two choruses will be the same, and you couldn’t be more wrong, because the second and third choruses, after extended palm muting, building drums and driving bass, a hellishly monstrous riff breaks out. It's long, ridiculously heavy, the kind of sludge metal/stoner metal riff that metal-heads will give a begrudging nod of approval over. Something similaremerges in ‘The Dark Below’. Much faster in tempo, its awash with pained vocal melodies, steady-strummed distorted guitar, danceable drums, and a breakneck chorus straight out of some Dinosaur Pile Up playbook. It's a track that will, among most others on this album, incite a raucous mosh-pit. ‘You’re my Dopamine’, a personal highlight of the album, encapsulates this melancholy chaos Tigercub are aiming for. Palm muted guitar sits alongside beautifully sinister guitar flourishes on the tracks opening, and a steady drumbeat and bass line inch the song ever forward to a chorus. The chorus hits hard, a concrete wall of a guitar line which follows a descending drum pattern, drawing you further into this moody alt-rock descent. The volume drawn out from the chorus remains for the entiresong, before the song resolves with that spooky guitar flourish. ‘We’re a Long Time Gone’, the only track on the album without wall-of-sound distortion and wall-shaking volume, sits comfortably in the middle of the track-list. It’s a beautiful mix of dissonant acoustic guitar melody with a subtle tremolo, droning bass lines that foreground the melancholy of the track and tender, steady drumming. It reminded me of something akin to Nirvana’s ‘Something in The Way’, a stripped back, emotionally weighty, understated track. Perhaps the best part of the song is the piano line in the latter half of the track, a descending melody that feels like a willful descent into a black hole. A perfect touch to a track already bleak and hazy. ‘Hurts When You’re Around’ trades out its fragile verses, with Jamie Halls vocals arguably at their tenderest, with a raging Soundgarden-esque chorus riff if ever there was one. Admittedly this track didn’t grab me as much the others on this album (personally I felt the loud-quiet dynamic was a bit too on the nose), however it absolutely belongs on the album. Then we have ‘Until I Forget’, the most chaotic, pulse-raising track on the entire album. It’s just under three minutes of filthy riffs, high-energy, near industrial drumming, heavy bass and guitar distortion and dissonant vocal efforts. It’s also the only track on the whole album with vocal screaming, something I remembered from ‘I.W.G.F.U.’ and couldn’t help but smile at when I heard it reiterated again. A purely furious track. Penultimate track ‘Shadowgraph’ acts somewhat as the outfit's album ballad. The melody from verse to pre-chorus sways and twirls like you’re in the event horizon of that black hole I mentioned earlier, but it soon gives way to the chorus, a colossal riff in odd time signature that syncopates around blistering drums and mammoth bass guitar tones. You came for the heavy riffs, and they saved the heaviest one right till the very end. To my surprise, the closing track of ‘The Perfume of Decay’ came in the form of the softly-sung, moody, and genuinely heartfelt ‘Help Me I’m Dreaming’. It’s arguably the track that bares the soul of Jamie Hall, and indeed Tigercub, in its entirety. It’s a track whose gliding, gloomy piano takes center-stage, with booming drums throughout and occasional wistful guitar lines moving in and out of existence. It’s without a doubt the most beautifully arranged song on the album, a closer that proves Tigercub can move hearts through a speaker as well as bodies in a mosh pit.
‘The Perfume of Decay’ feels almost like the band ventured into some nocturnal, whimsical graveyard, got utterly lost there, and then emerged out of that space with an album they crafted there. Never has an album I’ve heard in recent memory instilled such a captivating melancholy, yet through such a furious alt-rock filter. It's an album with such an emotional core and thematic consistency, listening to it either on first try or on repeat feels like you’re glimpsing their creative process from beginning to end. While I am perfectly aware that there won’t be another Tigercub album for quite some time, they’ve left enough in this current effort to more than satisfy me till then.
Words by Harry Meenagh
