XIII: Heard Of Cows? | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- We’re a long way from the early 2000s, back when Dan Sanders used to look like Richard Ashcroft and fronted successful WA rockers Gyroscope. I actually had to check quite hard that their successor outfit, XIII, was  the band I was thinking of. They’ve slimmed down the social media presence - Facebook, forget about it. However, more confusingly and importantly, new EP, Heard Of Cows? takes the screamo tendencies that used to lurk in the background of songs like Doctor Doctor and some others in the old Sanders playbook and sends them careering out ahead at full volume, top goddamn speed and shrieking like all the choirs of hell.

You can hear some of it on the band’s full-length, Bloody Banks Of The Swan. Sanders used to describe his approach in XIII as an alloy of Cobain bonded to Bowie (and, true, his look is much more Nirvana than The Verve these days) but, with the possible exception of a brief flourish on the cut Rock’n’Roll Will Eat My Soul Until The Day I Die- you can pretty much cut Major Tom and glam rock loose now. Actually this is way beyond even Bleach era Nirvana. Some of the other influences they now list -Fugazi, Jawbreaker- seem sort of apropos, but, to me, this has some of the same intensity as old At The Drive In, or one of their successors, like Sparta. Compounding that, in amongst Dan’s harder-than-ever-before vocals and the smashing guitar riffs, there’s quite a lot of the experimentalism that I associate -especially- with ATDI.

Much of the lyrical content dredges up the emotional maladjustment that, well, it felt very appropriate back, circa 2003, but hey, what has changed, really? There’s a brutish, rocky seesaw between ugly self-affirmation and its ****ty underside. “I'm livin' like a rhino, I'm livin' my life / I'm doin' my time though, but I'm doin' alright / I'm alright!” sprays out across album opener, But I Do Want You To Support Me And Be My Man. Some of the bile feels a bit uncomfortable in the #MeToo era: My Josephine’s creepily romantic / abusive vibe sounds like an invitation to a domestic violence order. Other moments, however, feel unerringly appropriate for today’s chaos, like the title Charting That Blue And Lonely Section Of Hell With Stephen King. I think Stephen King actually publicly apologised today for too accurately charting the mood of 2020 in his books. The song’s lyrically quite minimal, but also elliptical and yet the slow, grinding chorus simply brays the word “Survival”, over and over; that feels bang-on. The aforementioned Rock’n’Roll Will Eat My Soul oozes some more of that entertainment industry ugliness, searching for self and satisfaction in a way few therapists are likely to recommend: “I'm a torso, I need some legs / I need my arms and I need some head / I wanna be somebody! I wanna FEEL somebody!”

I Smell The Blood Of An Englishman may well, lyricially, be the most intriguing song on the record. It’s like one of those nasty biographical narratives The Peep Tempel do. I don’t know who it’s about -Prince Andrew? Donald Trump? Jimmy Saville?- but the vomitous mixture of privilege, rage, abusive character assassination and innuendo, shrieked out in lines like “I’ve got my hand in the cookie jar” or “Mumma's lil' baby loves horses horses / Mumma's lil' baby loves horses heads”, sounds like it’d make at least as good a Netflix special as it would a song.

Screamo is an uneasy genre: it produces authentic floods of emotion that can be as cringeworthy as it is possible to be in music. Its limp wrist can be found cranking the musical pump of so many genres; metalcore, for instance. These have produced reams of questionable hits for the kids to get down to. Although the torridly ugly characters that populate Heard Of Cows may not be an improvement on emotionally crippled teens, in other, much more positive ways, this is quite immune to the genre's foibles. This is not even a bunch of middle-age dudes bringing the skill that comes with experience and age, doing what they used to love. What it really is, is brutal, uncompromising and some of the best music that Dan Sanders and co. have ever made.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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