I've been familiar with Today Is The Day for quite a long time, and even though I have traversed their discography and revisited them fairly often, I still don't feel as intimate of a connection with them as our other reviewer has. As that particular review makes clear, Today Is The Day is a band that, with more than three decades under their helm, doesn't have much left to prove. This is a band that has written some of the edgiest and most harrowing noise rock out there, while also having enough versatility to take that either further into noise and sludge and hardcore, or back into something groovier and grungier and more introspective. No Good To Anyone made that pretty clear five years ago.
I do have to admit that most of the time I've been compelled to revisit Today Is The Day outside of No Good To Anyone's recent release, it was always either Sadness Will Prevail or an album released before it. Though I still enjoyed every album released since, it did feel like the behemoth that is Sadness Will Prevail exorcised some of Steve Austin's worst demons, and while that seemingly left a more well-adjusted person, it did also leave a less edgy musician. I wouldn't exactly frame it as a dip in quality, but as something that blunted some of the sound's edges, since that never actually made Today Is The Day release a bad album. Well. Until now.
I'm not entirely sure what happened between No Good To Anyone and Never Give In other than time passing and growing older to make Steve Austin tune things down even further. A lot of that comes in the form of the vocals mostly taking a sung approach that's closer to being softly spoken than anything else, with the vocals doing less expression of the harsher emotions, instead leaving that harshness to be taken over by the instrumental side. This contrast is one that should, in theory, work better than it does, and I can't say that Never Give In never makes it feel compelling, but it ends up feeling toothless more often than it should.
The instrumental side takes a lot more cues from industrial rock and krautrock, the former giving it some sort of noisier edge while the latter trying to inject some groove in its repetitious nature, but the execution of these does leave a lot to be desired. For an album that is shorter than its predecessor, it does actually feel like a longer affair, not only because of how jarring some of it feels, but also because songs like "I Got Nothin'" feel like they drag on forever, while some hard rock inspired riffing feels totally out of place in an album that still attempts, even superficially, to be noisy and harrowing.
I had hoped that the experimentation and theoretically intriguing contrasts on Never Give In would grow on me with further listens. I ended up liking it less with further listens, to the point where I had to recheck their previous albums to make sure I actually liked Today Is The Day in the first place. I do. Well, I guess after thirty years you are allowed one subpar album.
