Good Fucks, Better Lovers: come rock with us
Tickets are still available to rock out this weekend like the good old days of late-mid-90s when all music got hard. You merely must submit to the Better Lovers, the extra heavy while compellingly melodic band of happy-angry 40-somethings playing Gilman Sreet this Friday night. After all, what are Friday nights for than submitting to Better Lovers?
But first…
A couple of generations ago, even before the Dungeons & Dragons = Satan worship (remind me, do we capitalize “Satan”?) I remember my Texan cousin telling me with that irrepressible conviction of a 10-year-old girl that rock supergroup KISS worshipped Satan. That sounded kinda stupid to me and I did what we would call these days “pushed back on that” so I could just watch my KISS adventure TV show. But I did it with a twinkle in my eye…sooo, Heavy Metal scares the crud out of good, god-fearing parents and their frosted-and-teased-hair offspring. Perfect, my 9-year-old rebel self smiled.
Now a good 40 years on from KISS’s full-costumed TV specials —
— young people have again embraced the power of power chords. From shows full of kids to young bands around the country gigging their hardcore of all flavors (be on the watch for my upcoming piece on the revival of industrial music!) hard music may actually never die. That means that the contemporary music consumption landscape is rife for rockers of all ages to shred. After all, like a little Stanaism, heavy metal is good for you.
Better Lovers Grind It Out
One band that is hitting this wave hard is Better Lovers, a group of more-than-metal masters from pure power bands like Dillinger Escape Plan, Fit for an Autopsy, and Every Time I Die. If those names are unfamiliar to you, don’t look them up just yet. Instead click your preferred streamer right now and crank up the Better Lovers new LP Highly Irresponsible … if you dare.
These guys are bringing it hard, like testosterone-crazed teenage boys bent on pissing off everyone but with the gnarly chops of longtime players at the highest level. The effect is empowering, maddening, insane in truly the best way. Things in your home may be broken.
I caught up with guitarist Jordan Buckley over the phone as the band hurtled down the West Coast toward a crash landing at Bekerley’s legendary hardcore venue, 924 Gilman Street. He told me to stop pigeonholing the band with my effusive talk of mathcore and metal.
“Don't know if I'm going to give you the answer you're hoping for,” Buckley responded when I asked why he thought metal continues to be in demand. ”I feel like the band has kind of found each other and melded so well together, not as an expression of what's out there and trying to ‘capture’ it. We're pretty entertained by trying to sound like what's NOT out there. Granted it's going to be heavy because that's just kind of what we lean to, [although] not at all times—no pun intended,” he chuckled.
“At All Times" is the title of the power ballad on the album, an echo of the Glam Rock era’s obligatory inclusion of an emotional chorus repeated over a slow-build foundation of power chords and lots of toms. Frankly calling the song a “power ballad,” as the band’s PR does, is a stretch; the tune grinds and crunches with the relentlessly aggressive tone of the rest of the album much more than it recalls the likes of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” or “Sister Christian”—look ‘em up, younins—which is not a bad thing. Even with the band’s smooth big licks that link metalcore grind to occasional outbreaks of Queensrÿche-filtered-through-Lane Stanley full-lung singing, I feel like if Night Ranger listened to this album they might walk away after a couple of songs with a headache.
When I hear Greg Puciato's unhinged screams, whether in my beloved Dillinger Escape Plan or throughout the Better Lovers’ album, I feel a maelstrom of bliss. I don’t care if I’m genre-ing here, heavy metal matters to many of us. Mr Buckley agrees, even if he doesn’t want to use those exact words.
“We find loud aggressive music to be a great outlet in our lives. I know when I didn't have it during the pandemic and when I didn't have it between bands, I suffered and I could tell I needed it. I needed to have that release back in my life.”
There will be a day when I interview an artist and the conversation doesn’t come to how important art was for coping during the pandemic. Nearly five years on, we’re not there yet. The truth is that the future might still be enough to thwack us with one global crisis after another during which Art and Creativity—along with Love and Care—are the greatest tools to support us in those times, not because they are extraordinary, but because they are mundane. Everyone falls for art even when they don’t realize it, from Reagan to Selena Gomes to YouTube food channels.
“I just love the juxtaposition of it sounding angry and a lot of times it is angry, but you are better afterwards, you are better the rest of the week if you get it going on Friday night or a Saturday night,” said Buckley.
The Better Lovers tour means that the boys are banging out their anxiety, depression, and rage five nights a week. With their first LP just out, that meant that shows before the release have been filled with tunes unknown to the audience. But, writhing together in dimly lit rooms around the world, band and crowd after crowd repeatedly peaked together. They aren’t called Better Lovers for nothing.
Better Lovers Play 924 Gilman Street in Berkeley 7pm Friday November 29: https://app.showslinger.com/v/better-lovers-full-of-hel for tickets.
Read through the articles below for more metal-fueled emotional release.