Silver Daggers - "New High and Ord"

Silver Daggers - Real Neat Flag (Load 2007)

Silver Daggers - New High and Ord / Load

Though it took the entire summer of 2004, I eventually came to love Black Eyes' Cough. Maybe it was just the single greatness of "Drums" or maybe I was just feeling malleable, but by that August I had grown to appreciate what they were doing even if I wasn't going around telling everyone about it. When I found out they broke up right before they released Cough, I was slightly heartbroken: Here was a band that was using horns to push the free-jazz side of punk forward in a way that hadn't been done properly in years. It was all very no wave and Black Eyes were arguably Dischord's most promising band (alongside Q and Not U).

It's taken three years, but we're virtually in the same place on the calendar and I've finally heard something worthy to the immediate legacy that Black Eyes left: Welcome to the Smell-affiliated world of LA's Silver Daggers. Like our previous post on No Age, Silver Daggers have been heavily involved in the growth and development of the venue and community out there. With New High and Ord, the quintet has held up well from the promise of their early 7s to come through with a downright dirty set of 16 songs your friends still obsessing over Contortions and 99 will love.

There's so much happening here right from the word go on "Enter the King." Every member of the group plays some critical part: While William Kai Strangeland Manchaca throws in atonal keys and shares both vocal duties and sax skronk (There it is for this review) with Jenna Thornhill, Jackson Baugh violates his guitar to the listener's delight, Steven Kim finds irresistible grooves in the noise, and Marcus Savino just goes at it constantly on the skins. It sounds like it's a total disaster when I write it out, but as they've recently stated themselves, New High and Ord and Silver Daggers in general are just the synthesis of five people with totally different musical ideas and schools of thought contending. It's this tension that makes the album so wonderful. The drums of the title-track dominate while a cobra-taming sax line runs in the background and WKSM shares in the shouting with Thornhill. Like so many other songs on the record (that mostly clock in at around a minute-and-a-half, but this is an exception at nearly five), it's boisterous, it's lively, it's driven. That is Silver Daggers as a whole. "Real Neat Flag" is just one excellent example.

I know I'm behind when I sing their praises as this came out a month ago today. But I don't think it's ever really too late to get into something good (Also, Silver Daggers have not, to my knowledge, broken up; always a plus). It hasn't taken me nearly as long to jump head-first into this. New High and Ord may be a chaotic and messy collage of primitive synths and ultra-sharp guitar tones, but its emphasis on the punk in post-punk is one of the main reasons this sounds entirely different from so much else out there at the moment. They've learned the lessons of Lydia Lunch and still managed to take in the poptones of Public Image Ltd.

What remains is an unconquered public that's been trained to think that Gang of Four and Liquid Liquid are the epitome of one of the most significant musical movements of the last century. Er, not necessarily. Sitting on the other end of my toast is New High and Ord: Here's to another attempt at re-evaluating what post-punk and experimentation were all about.