SHOOTING DAGGERS – LOVE & RAGE (2024)
-New Heavy Sounds-
Two years have passed since the release of Athames (see: Karton #8), the first sharpy and well made EP from the London-based “Queercore” trio.
Two years spent infusing the frontal and rudimentary hardcore punk rage, (and sometimes post- stuff) for a radical and simple message: launching the fatal war cry against patriarchy dogmas.
Setting fire up to a punk scene macerated in its own contradictions, the rage to win highlighted and dagger-filled eyes.
| Review by Nino Futur
It only took two years for Shooting Daggers to rethink their angle of attack and concentrate their message. Relieve the visceral rage, put an end to the resignation of moving forward intimidated under the overwhelming punk male gaze, and the need of burning down immediately each figures of masculinity.
Totally positive, the three Londoners deliver to us a fresh and inspiring message. A deal of unity and collective exploit, of organizing together and opening up to no longer let the same social mechanisms crush the same victims.
“Not My Rival”, the first single from the album, is a magnificent interpretation, a call to empathy and eradication of internalized misogyny in each of us, to break the cycles and the inner man guiding our actions to get queers and women finally united. (“We watch ourselves being watched, an inner man governs the way we act.”).
“Dare,” the album’s opening track decidedly rock with a huge R, is a call for queer pride and acceptance, stop getting overwhelmed, and take the reins of our own life.
Within a direct reference to G.L.O.S.S. (rip), a prominent figure in the global queer punk scene calling out for giving violence a chance, it shows us that the daggers are not laid and that the Shooting Daggers mission does not even come to advocate pacifism. (If you don’t think so, just give a look to the very kaos punx lyrics of “Bad Seeds”and you’ll see).
With ever more careful production from Wayne Adams (UK based current extreme/electro music producer) “Love and Rage” is anchored in the lineage of this current hardcore scene distilled in the melancholy-melodic palette of the eternal 90’s.
Less frontal and raw than its predecessor, the compositions lean more towards the joyfully-sad groove of a current Turnstile (“Smug” ; “Tunnel vision”) or towards a grungy rock and roll reminiscent of the powerful melodic flights of Narrow Head (the indescribable efficiency of “Smug” chorus).
Or the simple freshness of a “Wipe Out” which serves as a general call for girls to take up skateboarding in order to make this discipline a little less blokey.
When it’s not hardcore that Shooting Daggers finds its resources from, it’s from all the contemplative spleen of US emo. How can’t we think of Title Fight’s “Head in the Ceiling fan” when listening to “A Guilty Conscience Needs an Accuser” where nostalgic and traumatic images merge in the blurry kaleidoscope drowned in guitar reverberations. Or to the Bostonians of Fiddlehead and their indie flashes through “Love and Rage”, an eponymous piece more imbued with postivity and resistance.
An album synonymous with hope and empowerment, “Love and Rage” has never lived up to its name so well, between the collective desire to rise and shine to the top, to give the best of oneself to blank out the oppressor, and a warrior will.
Shooting Daggers may have just released an angular album for the queercore scene through a work that is as frontal as it sensitive.
A call for affirmation and queer pride for a scene that is truly inclusive and aware of its weaknesses, creating alternatives instead of destroying everything. All for a reversal of roles and codes: turning pain into strength, love into rage.