Chris Rowley is an unlikely mouthpiece for adulthood. As a vocalist in the bombastic Brighton riot grrrl group Huggy Bear, he balanced the sardonic sneers of Niki Elliot and the harmonic cheers of Jo Johnson with his dry delivery, a spoken-word spitfire of resentment and frustration. “Kids get in, pulled out by parent-core in a gravy of envy they're descending,” he barked menacingly on their 1993 record Taking The Rough With The Smooch, a self-aware portrait of teenage rage. But in the 26 years since the band’s predetermined 1994 disbandment (the group, ever principled, allegedly decided their three-year lifespan before they began the band), Rowley has experienced the inevitable yet unthinkable for a one-time punk: middle age. The 55-year-old is now a father with a day job at a non-profit, who until recently had left his days of “boy-girl revolutions” in the past. If Book of Curses, his blistering debut as the frontman of Adulkt Life, is any indication, Rowley’s taut temper has only grown more gnarled in the intervening years. The only thing more infuriating than societal expectations of adolescence, it suggests, is the paralyzing ennui of growing old.
Adulkt Life (“no need to pronounce the ‘K’,” they insist) largely functions as a vehicle for Rowley’s lyrics, a focus that reflects the band’s inception. He connected with John Arthur Webb, who went on to found the British noise rock group Male Bonding, while shopping for records at Rough Trade in the early ’00s. Webb, upon discovering Rowley’s punk past, suggested that they record together. Their then-teenaged drummer and fellow Rough Trade regular, Sonny Barrett, was similarly sold after watching one of the sole live videos of Huggy Bear available on YouTube. With Male Bonding bassist Kevin Hendrick rounding out their sound, the band reimagines the intensity of riot grrrl within the brooding soundscape of post-punk and the thematic lens of fatherhood.
There’s still plenty of Huggy Bear’s “sex and confusion” abound on Book of Curses, but the former is couched in more Freudian, fraught terms: “In your hand a ticking cock,” Rowley shouts repeatedly on “Clean (But Itchy),” rushed as if the phrase were a subconscious tic or an all-possessing hex. And where Huggy Bear once sang of schoolyard sexuality, Rowley surveys the youth with suspicion on “New Curfew,” his rage building with each pass of the song’s winding, bluesy guitars. “What are these kids, 9 or 10?” he asks, before swallowing existential threats of climate change delivered by his daughter: “She said dad one day this will be gone.” Where Huggy Bear once sang of robbing cops, Adulkt Life mines the inner conflict of seeing your child’s generation take up the fight against state violence: “I don't know what I feel when I hear sirens outside anymore,” he yells, an eerily prescient summation of the deepening generational divide on law and order.
There’s an anxiety that pulsates through Book of Curses, from the squealing horns that pierce the opening track to the rumbling feedback that echoes throughout “Room Context,” like a storm brewing on a distant horizon. Rowley’s lyrical brevity darts between the equally sparse instrumentation—”Ha ha!” he taunts on “Whistle Country,” playing the counterpart to Webb’s blunt, dense guitar. “Whistle Country” channels the thrashing noise of Male Bonding into its barest possible sketches; each note lands with the intensity of their fiery debut, but with an added swagger. These are slow songs, but their rhythm crawls with stiffness rather than patience, played through hunched shoulders and bleary, bag-laden eyes. This is the measured, staggering punk of exhaustion, the tense lurch of a band that has internalized the cruel pacing of life itself—Book of Curses, much like adulthood, advances glacially until its building tension suddenly implodes.
Adulkt Life delivers urgent music for evergreen unease. Rather than shouting for revolution, it screams into the void. It seeks to fill the emptiness left by endless PTA meetings, the ceaselessness of work, the unending charge of new, befuddling technologies. Their debut pummels with a confidence borne from nihilism, an acceptance that comes with the realization that history has no natural arc, and that life only grows more vexing after the high-minded certainty of youthful indignance has passed. It’s rock made by a man who refuses to buy a cellphone; it’s poetry written through gritted teeth and the forced parental facade of calmness in the face of chaos. But it’s also crafted with an insatiable verve, an almost triumphant fury. Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.
Buy: Rough Trade
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