Helpless - Debt Rating: 8.5/10 Listen and purchase on their Bandcamp In a year that’s seen them set aflame and defaced, what’s another disfigured nun on the cover of a tough-as-fuck metal record? I came across Helpless and Debt by chance in an ad as I was playing From the Unforgiving Arms of God in preparation for our review, and having had my socks blown off by Full of Hell earlier this year and END’s kick-in-the-ass of a debut, I felt an immediate goodwill toward Debt’s “The Scream”-esque depiction of some nunnish, disease-ridden figure, and stuck it in my listening queue. The more I learned about Helpless, the more excited I became to hear what this UK band of former members of Godsick and Brotherhood of the Lake (one of the most criminally overlooked hardcore bands in the UK scene I know of) could do, and I’m happy to say my expectations were thoroughly met. That they’re on Holy Roar, the home label of Baptists, Employed To Serve, and formerly the UK’s “Converge on acid” Throats, is a no-brainer: variously described as powerviolence and blackened grindcore, Helpless amplify the knife-fight chaos of latter Nails and The Secret over the non-linear fury of metalcore underdogs like Curl Up and Die and Burnt By the Sun, which serendipitously positions them as a bit of a midway between Full of Hell and END. Every track is a pummeling configuration of sludge riffs, beatdowns (not breakdowns--there is a difference, as “Sertraline” and “Sinkhole” clearly illustrate), and spastic intensity, brushing the edges of mathcore and straight-up grind in their quest to punch the listener’s face in, and they succeed wonderfully. “Ceremony of Innocence” and its music video relay the gist of the band in under three minutes: the song itself is the sort of rager that Gaza could have written during the I Don’t Care Where I Go When I Die sessions, but the video plays like an excerpt from a much longer and more complicated film, capturing a single scene in which an older gentleman appears to defuse a bomb and deliver it to some inscrutable facility. Haunting the piece are a couple of black-masked guards whose reappearance at the very end of the video seems to signify the springing of a trap, if not some sort of retribution. His fate is left up in the air, but what’s most interesting about the video is that fact that it plays so differently on mute--when Helpless are audible, the dread and anxiety of the scene dials up to eleven, but viewed as a silent piece, the order of events seems to play out with a dreamlike inevitability. This seems intentional, as if to represent the band as some sort of alarm in the measured silence of our daily routines. Lyrically (at least according to the band, as it’s difficult to interpret what’s said without a lyric sheet), Helpless traffic in political outrage, which the video seems to demonstrate in the gentleman’s apparent hoodwinking at the end--we always seem to be getting the opposite of what we signed up for when it comes to affairs of government--and the juxtaposition of debt and helplessness in the album title sort of speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Like their message, the music is blunt, angry, and effective, but it runs into the same problems of homogeneity any powerviolence act faces. It can be difficult to tell songs apart on initial listens, making it difficult to latch onto anything as a listener other than the band’s raw fury. That might be enough for some, and it’s perfectly fine on a debut record, but Helpless could stand to explore some of the dynamic possibilities they hint toward on “Ceremony of Innocence” and “Denied Sale,” a chunky, rollicking slow-burner that brings the band’s sludge influences to the fore. It’s not to say that the brutal hooks of “Worth” or the chokehold of “Out of Commission” through “Weightless Prayers” are anything less than captivating--have Cult Leader written anything so Gaza since the rebranding?--but that contrast is as important as sheer impact, and a little more thought to how they spend their downtime would make these moments of frenzy that much more powerful. Debt is a stylish exercise in blending grind, hardcore, and mutilated nuns that promises a very bright future for the band. Nuance may be the one thing Helpless lacks at the moment, but as these short runtimes (most songs clocking in at the minute-and-a-half to two-minute range) and blunt titles (“Moral Bankruptcy,” “Weightless Prayers”) amply demonstrate, Helpless don’t have time to be concerned with expressing anything other than hatred and malcontent, and for now, that’s all they really need to do. -Brian L.
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