by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
With their 2021 debut, Wasteland: What Ails Our People is Clear, LICE created an album that ate itself. It was a dense slab of experimental rock that drew upon everything from Albini-esque 90s post-hardcore to Steve Reich minimalism and early British industrial soundscapes with an alarming dexterity. Yet underneath this genre-melding lay an even more ambitious aim, Wasteland was a satirical concept album about the failures of satire in music. One that wrapped those ideas into a complex Burroughs-esque sci-fi narrative told by a singer whose vocals landed somewhere between a particular unnerving PA system and a shrieking Victorian scientist. This fusion of ideas created an album that existed in such a tight world of its own that it appeared on the verge of beautiful fiery self-combustion. By contrast, their follow-up Third Time At The Beach is an album that almost acts as an evolving organism. Each listen to Wateland feels like a further dive deeper down a Lovecraftian mineshaft, each listen of Third Time instead feels like gazing upon a petri dish to find a slight expansion occurring from the test subject within.
This is almost certainly intentional. Wasteland was disengaged as a piece of criticism; Third Time is instead an essay in exploration. Described in press releases as ‘a three-part epic exploring our struggle to better understand the world around us’ Third Time’s three parts gradually track a journey to adulthood, an attempt to reevaluate the world and its history, and finally an embracement of their new understanding. It’s an undeniably ambitious concept yet it works fluidly in how it allows the music itself to tell much of the tale. Opener ‘Unscrewed’ combines gorgeous piano playing with electronic percussion and buzzes to create a sensation like opening one's eyes for the very first time. In contrast, lead single ‘Red Fibres’ grinding Jesus Lizard-esque post-hardcore verses and whirling prog blues guitar solos cascade against the rhythm section into shocking eruptions, like a grand second awakening to the crushing truth of the world around you.
That doesn’t mean frontman Alastair Shuttleworth has moved away from the foreground. His lyrics are just as dense as before, however, his delivery takes on greater dimensions than the screaming sprechgesang of their debut. Yes, there are still moments of Mark E. Smith-style mania such as on the previously mentioned ‘Red Fibres’ and the late game groover ‘Fatigued, Confused’ but these moments of rage appear more as eruptions. They match the track's own energy and place in the album, sounding like a petulant child screaming out against the universe. But on the other tracks, Shuttleworth’s voice acts as an instrument.
On ‘Moan in Circles’ overdubs of his vocals layer over one another to create a sonic blanket that stretches across the track until it's torn apart by Silas Dilke's eviscerating guitar solo. Across these tracks Alistair shows a new vocal range, his voice isn’t operatic in quality but that doesn’t mean he can't stretch it such as on closer ‘The Dance’ where it goes from spoken word into howls and finally down to nasally childlike mumbles. Often it takes on a near-percussive quality like a tranquil guide across the band's instrumental experimentation. It lands gracefully between the howling avant-punk of the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart and the eerie art pop of Laurie Anderson. This shift in tone further helps the delivery of his ever-intriguing lyrics. Shuttleworth images from history and literature with ease, flirting with macabre mineshaft visions, Dante allusions, and callbacks to The Wasteland with near acrobatic ease. His lyrics add to the album's replay value, the core messages appearing shouted in mantras while the deeper observations are hidden amongst chanting choruses and unnerving whispers.
Yet this album feels far more balanced towards the wider band than Wasteland. Where that album's blistering post-hardcore led to the band often acting as one tightened machine dedicated to the act of the sonic piledriver, the tracks on Third Time allow each instrument to glisten a little more. Take ‘Scenes from the Desert’ where a classic bluesy guitar lead fades into the background in favour of a deliciously dubby bass line that carries an off-putting thrill. Or on personal highlight 'Wrapped in a Sheet’ where layer after layer of deliciously hooky guitar riffs give way to an initially industrial-sounding synth solo before the drums kick into a schmoozy techno groove. While most instruments remain the same as Wasteland, the way they are used feels far more expansive. That album's phenomenal rhythms and dynamics are retained in Third Time’s clear chemistry, but now with an expansiveness that signals a movement away from Wasteland's focus on discomfort.
That switch from discomfort is felt most clearly in the absence of the ‘intonarumori’ an Italian futurist noise machine that bassist Gareth Johnson made for their previous album. It was an impressive beast that didn’t merely add to the sonic landscape of Wasteland but also spoke to that album’s main intent. To plum the past for techniques and methods to de-stagnate the guitar music of the now. You could hear that intent in every fiber of the album's being, from its Albini-style bass drum rhythm brutality to its sci-fi smut cum social satire lyrics. Third Time’s answer to the ‘intonarumori’ is the piano. It, alongside Silas Dilkes every inventive and impressive Rowland S. Howard gone math rock guitar playing, is the central instrument of Third Time.
The piano is gentle, precise, elegant, and strikingly central. Where Wasteland’s ‘intonarumori’ was a perfect metaphor for that album's strategies, a bludgeon from the past sent hurtling through the future, Third Time’s piano work is a guide across its complex lyrical vignettes and miniature epics. It’s what lulls us into the band's world on ‘Unscrewed’ and guides us with trepidation across the angular guitar riffs and glitched-out vocals of closer ‘The Dance’. It’s role as an instrument articulates the core concept of Third Time, that music can be used as a way of not merely satirizing the world but untangling its knotty complexities. The fact it does all this across such a varied and ever-engaging track isn’t merely impressive but significant. With Wasteland LICE suggested themselves to be among the smartest bands to emerge from Britain's sudden guitar renaissance. Now three years later they may just have cemented themselves as one of the very best.