Moved by the same electrifying cadence that winds up and keeps alive the dynamic activity of today’s young new noise breed, the Californian quartet Dead Poet Society consecrates his proposal with a second studio album titled “FISSION” (Spinefarm, 24) that expands the forcefulness of his original sound (tested in 2021 with his debut, “-!-”) and places them as one of the most genuine guitar projects of the season.
The goat rock and exhausting solo make it completely clear to us that our hours are numbered thanks to bands like the one led by Jack Underkofler, who with the naturalness of a confessed narrator with a wounded heart embraces the most liberating explosiveness and the most purging honesty. in a siege of thirteen cuts as effective as they are intimate. That aseptic and abstractly conjugated pain that the formation included in its past deliveries now changes gears and begins to be drawn in a more attractive tone (“How Could I Love You?”, “I Hope You Hate Me.”) and that the listener will be able to make his own and take to his field, playing with the universality that adolescent rage and harmful lack of love always generate.
It is precisely that shared and transversal language, manifest in their lyrics and underlined through those abrasive melodies (use the self-destructive story of “Running In Circles” as proof of this) which allows the album to flow lightly and manages to delight both a neophyte and fresh audience as well as those nostalgic for the more commercial punk-rock of the first two thousand years. A detail, this last one, not at all trivial if we focus on pointing out all the tropes of the genre that permeate the corpus of these songs with a low degree of surprise (whispers that precede the instrumental outbreak, intended but excessively clean distortion and verses spat out at great speed). speed over a fabric of steel and noise), sometimes generating the irremediable sensation of listening to a standard radio formula product, without much soul and perfectly interchangeable with any proposal with an easy rhythm and moderate rock (“Tipping Point”). We cannot deny the obvious, and that is that Dead Poet Society Neither do they invent a panacea with this LP nor do they contribute an excessive risky contribution to what other of their contemporaries are currently offering (it will be easy for when listening to them, names like Royal Blood, Nothing But Thieves and other first swords of that vague label called alternative rock).
However, and within this homogeneity of forms, Underkofler and company have the decorum to show that they have grown in confidence and now show us a more adult and self-aware discourse (exposed in diatribes such as that of “HURT”, which emphasizes the frustration of fueling a career of debatable profit), in order to ensure that its friendly choruses and catchy rhythms are not the only attraction that ends up being remembered about this new work. Those listeners who like to travel through the equidistant territory of forceful pop or sweetened rock will find in “FISSION” one of those jobs that fulfill its mission with calculated precision: energize without burning and protect without cloying.