Review:'Chapter Nineteen' 'A Story Well Told (EP)'
- Genre: 'Rock'
- Release Date: '23rd April 2021'
Our Rating:
Just as there are supposedly only two kinds of music – good and bad – there are two ways to tell a story – well, and poorly. I don’t necessarily believe that: narrative is a construct that people tend to buy into as a measure of storytelling, and adherence to its conventions are considered desirable by many, but less so for others.
Chapter Nineteen’s debut EP, a concept work of sorts, is centred around the tale of a band who tried, but, despite their immense potential, failed to break out. The duo seem to trip convention by prefacing the story with the final chapter, and, Benjamin Button-like skip backwards to trace the trajectory from a posthumous perspective through their struggles to their roots before flipping things round and racing forwards again. So maybe their biopic is perhaps more ‘Memento’; than anything. Or perhaps if not, it ought to be. I get more of a sense of a dissection of the band’s failure and the band’s own despair and self-doubt than I do their near misses. More often than not, potential can be measured not in music, but in self-belief and dogged determination, with the realisation of that potential coming through breaks.
It begins with an exchange of dialogue, seemingly exchanged in a back alley while dogs bark, before powering into ‘Why Even Try’, and it feels from the outset that the band’s failure was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The dialogue that precedes their ‘big stab’ at success covers how the band were misunderstood and how their big single received a mixed reception. Sonically, ‘When Nobody Cares’ is a lumbering riff-beast that’s in the vein of metal/grunge noisemakers Hawk Eyes – while lyrically it’s very much orientated toward the narrative, and as such feels like it belongs more to the realm of ‘the musical’ than ‘the song’ or ‘the EP’ (and in some ways, the formula is more akin to ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ than anything else.
The final track, ‘This Wasn’t Part of the Plan’, is slower and pretty bleak, as they pick through the wreckage of failure, grinding to the end with a Neurosis-like trudge into the abyss of absence in defeat. But the defeat was there from the beginning, and there is a sense that hard as they rage, the band in the story are not only victims of circumstance, but also victims of their own making to an extent. So few bands do ever break through, but pessimism is the most direct route to self-sabotage in the business.
These guys are clearly talented and have some big ideas to match their big riffs. The potential is clearly there, so here’s hoping they can fulfil it instead of becoming the foretellers of their own fate.
