by Alex Milstein (@thrillstein)
When a band forms -- whether it’s one person who started it and recruited others along the way, or a group of people who decided to jam with each other until something came together -- the members are usually friends beforehand. For London-based noise rockers Modern Rituals, the story is a bit different.
The band was started by Harry Fanshawe (guitar/vocals) and Jake Dore (drums) at the end of 2015 when Fanshawe was trying to get a new group assembled. While looking for another member, they started to write together and played a couple of shows with friends covering on bass. Then in early 2016, they recorded their first EP, Stranger Culture, which became a helpful tool for recruiting their now-bassist/second vocalist, Rob Hollamby.
Over the next two years, the group began playing more shows, added Alex Heffernan on second guitar, went on tour with the band Brunch, and wrote their first full-length album, The Light That Leaks In, which was released in 2018. Though the four were familiar to one another through growing up near Southampton, England, they weren’t actual friends before they started the band. That didn’t mean there wasn’t chemistry.
“We had some connections through old friends and such that meant we felt familiar, which meant we had an easy way of starting our friendships in this band,” Fanshawe explains.
After Heffernan left the band in 2018, Tom Hill joined on second guitar, solidifying their lineup once more. Hill is also a record producer, and he recorded and mixed their latest album, This is the History, the band’s most powerful release to date.
The Light That Leaks In is slightly more subdued compared with TITH. It’s sharp, and musicianship-wise, excellent, but it clearly sounds like a band still searching for their sound. Especially when you listen to it in comparison with TITH. As Hollamby puts it: “I think the new album has a much more cohesive thrust to it than the last album, where we were still figuring ourselves out. It's heavier, tighter and colder.”
And he’s right. The use of dynamics on this album also makes it seem like a more deliberate and comprehensive record than their past releases. Vocals swell in and out of mean screams and quiet croons, while the guitars bring a sense of controlled chaos. The bass and drums keep a heavy pulse that often erupts into pulverizing bursts but never falters from the beat.
The demoing and writing process for this album (i.e. working with Hill in his studio) afforded Modern Rituals more time to work on individual aspects of each song, especially additional instrumentation such as keys, strings and percussion.
A prime example of this is the eerie accordion on the songs “Passageway” and “This Is The History.” (Fanshawe scored an old accordion off of a man in Totton, England, who’d sold it for super cheap because it was missing a key cover). On the title track, Harry’s vibey accordion is layered with softly played strings. In the mixing stage, they were careful not to make the strings feel too pretty or shiny at any point, keeping them a little more organic, and in some cases gritty.
“Passageway” also features an accordion, but this time with strings playing clashing notes simultaneously. They snuck a few other twisted and uncomfortable sounds in as well by scraping together metal boxes, rubbing snare drum heads together or using stacks of broken cymbals. They also messed around with a Leslie speaker, which spins around and creates this whooshing noise as the sound bounces between sides.
Bands like Daughters, Cursive, Fugazi and Broken Social Scene inspired the writing on TITH, as Fanshawe says his brain will tend to assign a band to a Modern Rituals song as they’re writing it, only to realize after they’ve written the song that he’s been channeling a band or two the whole time.
The band has clearly grown into their sound, and they’ve done an impressive job channeling their influences without sounding like their ripping off any other band. One track on TITH where this becomes clear is “Moses.”
It’s an absolute beast dynamically, and the ending can only be described as triumphant, alternating between robust and wooo-ing vocals accompanied by squealing guitars and quiet phrases where only the drums and faint guitars hang around.
Overall, Fanshawe says previous learning experiences, a closer connectivity of the band members and a great option of quality demo-making via Hill’s production skills all lead to the creation of TITH. “I’d say on the whole it was built upon from our previous efforts, but we just gave this one a huge amount of time and energy,” Fanshawe adds.
The band was supposed to start their tour of TITH in mid-May, but it has been rescheduled for November due to COVID-19. The new tour will hit most of the same cities and dates will be announced in the near future.