High Vis: Guided Tour
(Dais)
LP | CD | DL
Released 18th Oct available HERE
Anthems we can’t be sure have been written before, or the likes of which will ever happen again, anthems of sweat and repetition, a way to hoist ourselves out of the turbulences of the fractured, societal malaise. Such is the unabating, insatiable multiplicity of modern life, all soundtracked by High Vis on their third full-length for Dais Records, Guided Tour. By Ryan Walker.
Recorded across a few weeks at Holy Mountain Studios in London with producer Jonah Falco and engineer Stanley Gravett (who also helmed the sessions for 2022’s Blending), Guided Tour is a concentration of all High Vis have come to claim as their own: a reflection on boundaries being crossed, bridges being built one plank at a time, a fierce and synergistic monument that divides walls of exclusivity being by cutting them to brick. The dynamic attraction and bottomless source of an open field from which High Vis have been turning to since their debut album, and their origins in the culture of hardcore that raised and informed their outlook since the start.
Following prior releases, such as the debut from 2019, No Sense No Feeling, and the synth-spliced Society Exists EP, guided tour is exactly that: a demonstration of how the band has moved on, forwards, through shit, and success. From the crystalline ricochets and loose-fit jingle-jangle snarling from the epicentre of the heyday those jangles shone brightly from, through to the tribal legions of apocalyptic post-punk drift, warfare attack, paranoia and bite and the brooding electronic ripples that oscillates between the second summer of love, the shadow it cast and the post-industrial landscape that swings in its wake, High Vis know these treacherous passages and unwinding roads like tattoos on the backs of one’s hands. Intimate as an eyelash or an earring. Fragile as an explosive device in need of disarming. Tempestuous as a teenage volcano.
Start the car. Stay in it. High Vis prowls throughout in a silent vehicle. Voyeurs of the darkness and violence. The Specials in Ghost Town. Nocturnal cruise machine. Tower block behind the sky. Tower block before the sky. Tower block is the sky. The city ablaze with a series of chat piles and spikes like it suddenly woke up with a chronic case of acne and arse-ache. Stench of takeaway flesh. Rotten corpse in the corner of one’s eye. It smiles. Smiles like a knife capturing the light of the moon or the fire horn of a glass horizon. High Vis are here. The young men wielding rage as an instrument.
From here to where? Or where to here? What conditions, contexts and consequences unfold?
As a gang of fragments slotted into each other from respected punk groups (Dirty Money, Tremors, City Dweller, Reflect, Shame, and more), for High Vis, the fuse of hardcore is always ignited, in the centre of everything, it’s vital spirit, the broader spirit of hardcore’s enduring, and endearing life force kept intact and illuminating communities that come to High Vis because they offer exactly what High Vis offered to its founding members: an opportunity to belong, to be free, to be real, touch base, transcend it.
In situations like this, style is a label in need of unsticking from the tin can – there’s a whole state of mind inside waiting to happen. Points of reference and pots of endlessly melting, fevered energies will reclaim their position as the vehicle to motion that state of mind. ”For years hardcore had pretty clear boundaries, other scenes were separate worlds” Sayle says on their hardcore roots. ”Now things are getting more blended, drawing from different places”.
This different place, this sense of blending is regularly rushing throughout the bloodstream of the whole statement: anthemic, airless, angular, with Sayle, here taking a more predominant role in lyric and melody writing embodying the attitude of a matador harbouring both the consciousness of disparate dregs of wider society whilst also dialling in on himself walking throughout it’s wastelands, somehow capable of both confronting and articulating the collapse of savage psychological labyrinths, benignly endured with cotton-wool numbed emotions and a slurry of gruesome, political minotaurs that take great delight in tightening the noose thrown around the neck of New England. This is the dark valley High Vis enter battle with, trapped by madness, broken and blistered, a fearful gloom true to not just their hardcore roots, but their roots, and everyone else’s. ”Everyone’s scratching, everyone’s working all the time, and their idea of relaxing is just getting fucked and avoiding reality” Sayle explains. ”This album is an escape from that.”
Drop Me Out is an anarchic uprising of speartip-sharp punk guitars and anthemic 90s riffage from the indie songbook, all spat on with some of the pages ripped out and a sperm-shooting dick in the corner, the savage bastard glam of the weekly NME staples of self-assertive Britpop darlings and demigods somehow burned as an effigy of inspirational sacrifice and embarrassment. High Vis takes that street-level reference, yet animalistic as they are, they refrain from total atavism in favour of throwing something fresh in our faces.
From the prismatic groove and glide of the opening tune, Guided Tour, you’d be forgiven for thinking a generous chunk of this album is the Paris Angels album that never was. But the neo-psychedelic swirl and propulsive torrent of Feeling Bless dissolves, blissfully shimmers and erupts with distinct post-punk wire cutter vitriol and whirlpool of unifying power. ”It’s trying to be a hopeful record, while also being incensed” Sayle says. Meanwhile, the restless, jovial thud and spurt of Fill the Gap conjures up images of dashing daffodils into the air as though they were unpinned hand grenades (or visa versa) – an amphetamine stampede of manic rhythms and metallic guitars, an infectious chorale that impregnates the mind with call and response vocals, permeating everything it penetrates as fog disperses throughout a terrain of beer-soaked, blood-stained-trampled floors.
High and rising hard, the caustic spray of Mob DLA ushers the album into more abrasive avenues. With a chorus that could resurrect a shipwreck and see it sail again, Graham Sayle’s vocals lean, loud and clear against the ear as though it was a wall, all UK82 punk spree, crash and frenzy thanks to Ski Harper’s fire squad rattle and frenetic-tentacled kit action. Elsewhere, the electronic shuffle and click of Untethered parts all clouds with Jack Muncaster’s warm, honeyed basslines rolling down the middle of the surging, melodic outburst.
There’s an unavoidable interplay of blinding intricacy between guitarists Martin Macnamara and Rob Hammaren throughout the record, always managing to their flag into the soil, establishing their prowess, their sonic tornado tearing up houses from their foundations, and throwing them to the floor like emptying a box of Lego onto the carpet. They dip and dive and dart in and around each other – a psychic striking of the matches against each other’s strip of sandpaper fretboard, watching the whole thing turn to mulch as it burns up.
Deserve It or the merciless surge of Gone Forever addresses this dynamic. The former channels an inner rage. Expressing it as beauty. A sonic climax as though trains would tear through dark tunnels or stairwells would amplify the bustle of people going up and down. The latter, a different kind of crash and impact, is as blunt, blatant, unforgiving, and entirely unforgettable as the tune, which has no issue in reminding us. Sayle’s snarl slices through the jump-cut atmospherics, claustrophobic wheels of ultraviolet guitars and an enchanting, ethereal reference to Mind’s A Lie with its respite of house-inflected vocals creeping up towards the final takeover.
A gorgeous anomaly in amongst the high-octane gut-punch and chest-wrench of the largely indie rock sparkle and malice of the remaining record, Mind’s A Lie represents the indomitable presence of electronica working its chemical spells throughout the underground of England, the odd one out, but also utterly at peace and at one with whatever records may be stacked against it on the shelves: the Avalanches EP nestled next to Adorable. Featuring vocal samples from celebrated South London singer and DJ Ell Murphy, it’s a song for every single occasion ever imagined in the history of mankind. With a tireless drum kicking down the middle, crashing waves of dreampop textures and a spectral reflex of corruscated, post-punk fizz that warms the bones the more it washes through the veins, the tune resounds across the country as a pirate radio beaconing from afar, broadcasting tomorrow’s garage classics (a High Vis acid house album must be arranged) – connecting and buoyantly bouncing on the airwaves and astral planes we cannot help but be either carried upon or consumed by, in moments of psychological abandon. It’s not even the last song, but it should be.
Hardcore has never sounded so…hardcore.
Check out the video for Mind’s A Lie written and directed by Martina Pastori below:
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High Vis | Website | Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram
High Vis is currently on the CORPUS GROWS tour across North America supporting Show Me The Body, alongside additional support from BIB, Special Interest, ZelooperZ, Bearcat, and Black Noi$e on select dates.
Ahead of the CORPUS GROWS tour, High Vis and Show Me The Body shared their collaborative track, Stomach. Listen HERE.
Following the North American run, High Vis tour Europe for their headline tour slated for this November and December with support from Pain of Truth ahead of their forthcoming UK shows in February 2025 with support from Narrow Head.
Words by Ryan Walker
Photo by James Edson ©
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