Band:	Coilguns
Album:	Odd Love
Style:	Mathcore, Noise rock
Release date:	November 22, 2024
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. We Missed The Parade
02. Placeholders
03. Generic Skincare
04. Black Chyme
05. Bandwagoning
06. Caravel
07. Venetian Blinds
08. Featherweight
09. The Wind To Wash The Pain
10. Bunker Vaults (Intro)
11. Bunker Vaults

After putting themselves to a time test with 2019’s Watchwinders, written and recorded in the span of a single month, Coilguns cooled off for a few years before coming out with Odd Love, a record that naturally sounds less stressed out about its own existence.

In fact, Odd Love isn’t quite as stressed about anything, nor as stressful a listen. That’s a somewhat unflattering shift for a band that previously claimed frenetic, sludgy chaos as its bread and butter. The biggest distinction of Odd Love is how standard it is relative to the rest of the Coilguns catalogue. Its heaviness is more restrained, its structures more conventional; it is neither as aggressive in its rhythms and melodies, nor as consuming in its atmosphere, nor as dynamic in its shifts. The legato, broken-chord riffs and fuzzy bass retain more of the post-metal direction explored on Millennials than the band’s traditional battering mathcore assault, but a lot of the songs are mid-paced and vocal-driven, shifting Coilguns ever more into an alternative metal context.

That’s not to say that Odd Love is a totally by-the-books hardcore or sludge album. If the all-out intensity has been dialed down to a some-out concentration, this album still pursues some of the band’s quirkier directions. There are little touches of oddness, like the whistling in “Placeholders”, which is matched with some Gojira-on-the-road chugging that persists in “Black Chyme”, and “Caravel” comes packaged with an X Japan piano solo. The pace and energy do pick up periodically, and Coilguns clearly have not forgotten how to achieve sheer heaviness: “Generic Skincare”, for example, ends with a pretty satisfying burst of octane. “Featherweight” makes for an album highlight: its understated, groaning chugs intermittently burst into explosive choruses where you can feel the full weight and conviction of the band. “Black Chyme” is also worth a listen for its tense and alt-tinged riffs and odd rhythms.

But it is to say that something is different, and different is not always positive. Odd Love follows from Watchwinders in placing much greater emphasis on the vocals than the first two Coilguns albums, which were, if not exactly instrumental, less interested in “singing” per se – on both Commuters and Millennials, the vocals were often diffused into the background, forming part of the wall of sound. Though Commuters stuck closer to a typical hardcore style, Millennials took the step of dispensing with lyrics sometimes, opting for wordless shrieks and screams in the background that positioned Louis Jucker’s voice as yet another instrument, and therein lies a lot of the intrigue of that album’s sound. Now Odd Love swings back around, with Jucker not only taking place at the front of the band but also dropping some of his distortion and aggression. He employs more vocal variation here: sometimes cleaner singing that’s neither talking nor screaming, often using vibrato and more obvious pitch, sometimes even humming up to falsetto. While the relative primacy and cleanness of the vocals do go back to Watchwinders, more precedent for the exact approach can be found in Jucker’s brief solo sojourn, the Coilguns-backed live-in-the-studio release Louis Jucker & Coilguns Play Kra​̊​keslottet (The Crow's Castle) & Other Songs From The Northern Shores [Collaboration]Louis Jucker & Coilguns Play Kra​̊​keslottet (The Crow's Castle) & Other Songs From The Northern Shores [Collaboration][/album]. That material sounds like a stepping stone from past Coilguns to current Coilguns, with a more country-influenced and accessible rock style.

“Caravel” provides a fine case study. It has vocal melodies and layers that sound distinctly alternative rock/pop indie, and although its ominous and apprehensive instrumentals make for an engaging atmosphere (such as the aforementioned piano intrusion), the veritable mildness of the vocal approach and resulting subordination of those instrumentals pulls the song out of the bracket of post-metal heaviness that the band could swim in before. If this song had appeared on Millennials, instead of lyrics sung in a medium range with a slight whine, the vocals would just be wordless howls disguised in a crush of chords. I’m not a fan of the altered vocal palette on this album; the intonation and affectations dive much more into modern pop rock than into punk, and while the individual phrasings often have the slight concluding upturn and distortion typically associated with hardcore, the delivery is not extreme enough to push that effect all the way into power. With the fluttering falsetto and half-spoken rasps applied to many a verse on this album, I feel like I’m listening to Bono or Imagine Dragons sometimes.

“The Wind To Wash The Pain” illustrates the best of what Coilguns could achieve should its songwriting and sound be more congruent. It’s another highlight of the album, contrasting the harshness of “Featherweight” with a semi-acoustic, almost droney piece that is at first lighter and calmer, eventually darker and doomier. Here Coilguns are consciously going much further into the realms of softness and reflection, so it works for me; the only percussion is distant jingle bells, and the plaintive vocals and haunting guitars commit fully to the clean, quiet atmosphere in a way that retains the harshness, atonality, and rich heaviness of their more mathcore-/post-metal-oriented material without actually recapitulating the same ideas.

Unfortunately, those moments where things really click are infrequent. Odd Love is overall a less interesting album than its predecessors. There is less dynamism in the song structures and styles, with more uniformity from song to song (there are even two back-to-back songs with the exact same length). This is Coilguns not as spastic or as stylistically adventurous as before. It’s hardly a bad album, with several outstanding tracks and some digressions that shield the band from accusations of going genre-compliant; it’s generally a fun listen. Still, this is a kind of album that a lot of bands could produce; Millennials was not, and even Commuters and Watchwinders were not.