There’s nothing like a blast of fiery post-hardcore to blow away the cobwebs in the wake of the festive season, and this is nothing like a blast of fiery post-hardcore. Ok, I’m being rather mean-spirited here: the debut album from Promethee, the snappily-titled ‘Nothing Happens, Nobody Comes, Nobody Goes’ isn’t that bad and certainly packs some clout with its marriage of thunderous percussion, guttural vocals and frenzied guitars.
But it is all rather overblown and pretentious: the lyrics to ‘Genesis’ are taken from Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ (or ‘Waiting Godot’ as the sleeve notes state), to which the album’s title is a reference. Then there’s ‘Thus Spoke’, which opens with the lines ‘Oh great father, oh grand king, why have you left oh why have you fled’. I’m not knocking the band’s more literary leanings per se, and I’m certainly not dissing their sincerity and earnestness so much as the way it manifests as po-faced sixth-form angst as filtered through the Romantic poets and a cursory reading of Nietzsche. The titles themselves speak volumes: ‘The Great Deception’; ‘Banner of Lies’; ‘Of Loss and Disgust’; ‘The New Face of Mankind’; ‘Sickness Unto Death’; ‘Oblivion’.
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The flamboyant fretwanking that dominated their eponymous EP has been reigned in a fair bit, but there are still moments when pompous arpeggios and fiddly flourishes impinge on the full-throttle riffage. In conjunction with the endless references to betrayal, death, doom, darkness, death, blood, emptiness and death, the whole thing begins to grate long before the album’s through. Not so much a case of nothing happens, as the same thing happens ten times.
Promethee Online
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