It took me many years to come to terms with the strange place that Poison the Well holds in a corner of my heart. Metalcore, as popularised in the early ’00s, struck me at the time as entirely incongruous. It made no sense that these clearly upset men, who roared angrily atop voracious riffage, could change tack in an instant to wail saccharine choruses, often confessing their heartfelt love for any number of high school sweethearts. Within those mushy passages of play, they were either laying claim to being the lothario’s lothario or letting active imaginations do some very heavy lifting.
The brootal-lyllaby dynamic was an horrifically popular device across the genre, with the likes of Trustkill, Ferret, Victory et al. issuing whole catalogues of the stuff and inspiring legions of floppy-haired ‘kids’ who moped around in black T-shirts adorned with faux ink-splattered band logos, white belts and bad jeans. The screamers couldn’t scream, and the singers couldn’t sing, made worse by the cheap, over-compressed production of the period.
And then, one afternoon in 2003, my guard was breached after a slow boat. Who amongst us can’t say they’ve never been radicalised when under the influence? Amongst friends who tortured the party that day with all manner of crimes against humanity (Finch, Rancid, Less Than Jake), the newly released You Come Before You was slipped into the compact disc player.
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Facing a bout of smoke-infused cognitive dissonance, my gears ground. My loins stirred. What played was several cuts above its contemporaries. Weeks passed, yet the hooks and melodies lived in my head. I’d had my universe wrenched asunder by the album’s progressive musicianship and much-heralded production in exotic Sweden. Still unclear as to the musical chasms I was beginning to bridge, I was somewhat ashamed at contravening my own internal rules-based order, the disdain for the broader genre firmly in place.
After months of deliberation, I had my girlfriend purchase Tear from the Red from Soho’s defunct Select-a-Disc as I waited outside, too embarrassed to do so myself lest the regular staff catch me purchasing anything beside old school punk, Three One G or Gold Standard Labs release (I did love that shop so).
A hidden secret within the privacy of my own ears, Tear… was on regular rotation in my Sony Discman. The following year, I saw Poison the Well live in support of the Dillinger Escape Plan at Kentish Town’s Forum. While I can’t recall the respective sets that well, I do remember Jeffrey Moreira complaining between songs of being punched in the face while asleep by Dillinger’s gym bunny of a frontman, Greg Puciato. The whole auditorium broke into laughter.
Poison the Well - Peace in PlaceLeaving London in 2005 to return to my hometown on the other side of the world, the scourge of the singy-screamy metal bands continued into the decade, plaguing my own backwater of a city. In the interceding years, Poison the Well released two further albums. 2007’s Versions, a decent effort, marked another interesting turn, incorporating shrill Telecaster tonal twangs with a surf rock bent. They weren’t simply regurgitating the tried (tired) and tested formulas that heavier bands would often rinse and repeat ad nauseam.
2009’s The Tropic Rot wasn’t a terrible album, just somewhat bland and one I’ve never felt any urge to revisit. Still, they’d long dispensed with mindless chuggery and double pedalling, thankfully. With line-up changes afoot, including guitarist Derek Miller’s departure and subsequent formation of the diabolical duo, Sleigh Bells (aural molten plastic), Poison the Well’s three key members, Ryan Primack, Chris Hornbrook and Moreira, took time off, playing sporadic shows for the next thirteen years.
I’ve not delved any further into what they did with themselves on hiatus besides spotting a headline mentioning fatherhood. Punks eventually have to grow up, right? Now, with children at presumably manageable ages, the band have some ‘me’ time back to themselves in the evenings and have returned with Peace in Place, their first album in seventeen years. Ordering the CD, I was very pleased to see that jewel cases are back, too. Digipaks are the bane of any music collector’s physical media. Unevenly shaped, they stack poorly and fall apart easily. Music isn’t single use.
In any case, Peace in Place sits within the upper tiers of the band’s discography. Well-produced, the tension and release dynamics are executed with aplomb across its ten songs. There’s even a hidden track, like the olden days. Jeffrey hasn’t lost it, still belting out both shouts and melodies with precision which, for me, always set them apart from the aforementioned schlock their counterparts spewed. Standout numbers for me are Thoroughbreds, Everything Hurts (man, they can write a good hook), the singalong-able Weeping Tones, Bad Bodies and Drifting Without End, though holistically it’s all one long banger.
Never one to extract every piece of third-party insight I can find into the music I’m listening to, I have little idea what the album is about conceptually or lyrically. I may read the liner notes one day, but emotively, and nostalgically, it hits all the right notes and makes a near-middle-aged man like me (and the band) reach fondly back into the realms of yesteryear, a melancholic tear at the ready. They’re the band that have always executed a questionable genre well, breathing some fresh air into those old lungs, and never atrophying or rehashing, as did a recent release from another legacy band from the scene, I felt.
It’s been a quarter of a century since that fateful afternoon. I am happily ignorant of the state of metalcore as it exists today, opting now for the softer tones of IDM (I can hardly contain my excitement for the new Boards of Canada), but Poison the Well persists, scratching an itch for a long-lost moment in time. And rightfully so.
Peace in Place is out now via SHARPTONE. Purchase here.
