'Still No Future' by Grail Guard
Review
Grail Guard loathe racism & today sees the release (on TNS Records) of their ‘Still No Future' album on which they make this crystal clear over the course of ten songs.
Some ("People Just Like You", "Anxieties" and "Our Streets" have been very recent singles, others have been shared in demo form over the last couple of years: most you'll know if you've been to a gig (but for the record the song titles are "Cruel Britannia", "Insomnia", "Safe Space", "Alan", "The Rotten", "Still Fucked Up" (a version of which you will recall from ‘Hot Music Live Presents Volume Twelve') and "Rats").
These songs are built for clobbering bigots & do so via a cunning combination of overwhelming fury (the band have managed to extract the maximum of this from each song since the demo forms) and clearly stating the unanswerable arguments which rip the arguments of the bigoted into tiny fragments (not that racist ideology has a terribly profound intellectual base to begin with of course).
I had better repeat (from earlier articles) the points that racists are probably too dense & stuck in their ways to grasp Grail Guard's excellent points, however well articulated, but at least these fine anthems (which they are) give heart & encouragement to all those fighting fascism.
If you haven't yet read ‘Empireland' by Sathnam Sanghera, then I recommend it. In the meantime ‘Still No Future' functions as a pretty accurate rendering of it into musical form.
It's difficult therefore to identify the prime aspect of these songs: polemic, rallying cry or celebration of the values of the righteous. Why can't it be all three? I imagine that Grail Guard are attempting to keep things going on several layers. This set really gives the notion that punk is by nature simplistic: either musically or philosophically. It's a stick the form has so often been beaten with (unfortunately identikit punk bands who go for a uniform look & sound don't help) but from the start the genre addressed issues of race, gender, identity, ecology & many more and to me this elevates it way above blander noodling which in some ways satisfies the cravings of those fetishising "technical excellence" even when singing platitudes.
In fact, characterising ‘Still No Future' as being a series of diatribes against racism would actually find me guilty of simplification: Grail Guard take aim not just at this vile target but at its associated nastinesses from macro level (the whole corrupt system of capitalism which spawns bigotry in "The Rotten") to the specific: in this case a piece of work named "Alan" and his lack of empathy.
Don't overlook the album title either please: the band are conscious that punk emerged fifty years ago during another peak of right wing thuggery and they wonder what has been achieved: especially given the corporate, governmental & global backing for racist rhetoric & policies which has developed in the intervening years.
Grail Guard fan Sick Dick Warlock (of Stegosaurus Sex Party) has already gone public with his admiration for the album (" (I) remember seeing them the first time a couple years ago and saying to the Steg lads "this lot are born ready" - they had a furious energy from the get go and it's plain to see the work they put in") and in expressing the wish that "..it might just smash through to something bigger" he was referring mainly to both the band and the wider local scene. However I think that the sentiment could apply also to the aims of Grail Guard for the album. If half a century of punk rock & organised anti racism has led us from the street thuggery of the National Front to the rise of Trump and Farage etc, then it's not only not been successful enough but needs to step up further and "smash through" to a much broader and effective counter attack on intolerance. Let's face it, that's what these songs are all saying in ways which don't leave any room for misinterpretation.
