Material Control wouldn’t exist if Daryl Palumbo didn’t believe it was “the most Glassjaw-sounding music we could be making at this point.” There is no doubting the purity of their vision, as lead single “New White Extremity” is Glassjaw as hell. Its aggression and abrasive, abstract skronk tie together New York hardcore and no wave, mixed with astringent third-wave emo melody and the CGI’d musculature of nu-metal production—all with Palumbo doing his ocean-sized roar over it all like Long Island’s answer to Perry Farrell. In 2015, the band released “New White Extremity” as a one-off, assumed to lead up to this very moment, where it serves as the opener for the first Glassjaw album in 15 years. If there was any doubt whether Glassjaw can pick up where they left off, Material Control answers it as immediately and literally as possible.
Whether or not they were doubted, Glassjaw were going to act as if they were. They’re a band that’s thrived in a state of constant conflict. Fan favorites from their 2000 debut Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Silence include “Pretty Lush” and “Ry-Ry’s Song,” chief exhibits among the evidence of their scene’s ingrained misogyny. These were scorched-earth responses to romantic betrayal performed with such energy that they sound like an endorsement. With their 2002 album Worship and Tribute, Glassjaw were positioned as post-hardcore’s Next Big Thing, forged under the pressure of Warner Bros. execs, the Twin Towers of nu-metal (producer Ross Robinson, mixer Chris Lord-Alge), and the band’s own outsized ambitions. It didn’t have the impact of, say, Relationship of Command, but like At the Drive In, Glassjaw followed their frenzied, fraught breakthrough by taking the next decade off.
While creating Material Control, multi-instrumentalist Justin Beck (he and Palumbo constitute the core of Glassjaw) asked a rhetorical question: “Yo, if we were 14 again and recording with Martin Bisi and could just be the illest, grimiest band in New York, what would the environment be like?” This is a smart approach, especially in the wake of recent albums from post-hardcore greats like At the Drive In, Refused, and Quicksand. Think of the fan who found those other albums to be hella soft, who wrongly assumed that Palumbo would remain too committed to the pop ambitions of his regrettably-named electronica outfits Head Automatica and Colour Film—Material Control is for that person.
Material Control certainly can lay claim to being Glassjaw’s heaviest or most aggro album. And though most of Palumbo’s lyrics are too circumspect to get much across beyond their titles (“My Conscience Weighs a Ton,” “Bibleland 6”), he says it’s political in a “George Carlin way.” “New White Extremity” surveys the demographics of a new Brooklyn, which Beck describes as “white people from Kansas.” Despite their multimedia affinity for gruff, hardscrabble NYC cynicism, Material Control lives in the now, one of constant physical and mental confrontation and claustrophobia. Like their hardcore heroes, Glassjaw want you to feel the experience of getting constantly elbowed on the street and the subway, only now it also happens while staring at an iPhone and getting constantly prodded by bad opinions.
Nearly every second of Material Control is meant to duplicate this sensory overload. Beck, in particular, puts forth a performance of remarkable endurance and dexterity, neck-snap riffs constantly battling his textural playing in the right channel, intended as field recordings from the concrete jungle—circular saws meeting sheet metal, the blare of car horns, jammed traffic. Without Dillinger Escape Plan to use as an outlet anymore, drummer Billy Rymer pushes his new band to their most feral extremes, shuttling from groove-metal, d-beat insanity, free-form dub, and tabla-spiked drone in consecutive tracks.
But Glassjaw are so intent on proving they can still Glassjaw that they leave no space to build, to create dynamics or generate atmosphere. They really leave no space for Palumbo, and while there are distinct choruses, there are no hooks. There are more memorable basslines than vocal melodies. If Glassjaw was expected to top their forebears like Orange 9mm and Mind Over Matter as a commercial proposition, though, it was due to Palumbo—a “Jeff Buckley-in-hell post-hardcore,” an unusually magnetic presence for this grotty realm. But he can’t work within these arrangements so much as over or under them. Palumbo elongates vowels while improvising pitch and hoping for the best. Elsewhere, he’s almost completely submerged in a mix created without nuance or mercy.
If you can withstand the initial onslaught of Material Control, it can be plucked for stems: the cooed harmonies on “Shira,” the warm bass countermelodies from “Golgotha,” any of the individual elements of “Pretty Hell.” The latter serves as the kind of U-turn into amniotic balladry that has sustained the midsections of Deftones albums for the past 20 years. Despite its studied dub production, “Pretty Hell” is a mess that wastes the strongest chorus on an arrangement where no instrument appears to be aware of the other’s existence. There are points where Glassjaw can work towards a satisfying payoff rather than going all in at once, like the raga experiment “Bastille Day” and the title track, which both aspire to the symphonic grandeur of major-label Trail of Dead.
To Palumbo’s credit, he recognizes the potency of being that angry, impulsive 14-year-old hardcore kid—though he’s now channeling his adolescent rage towards more worthy targets. On an immediate level, Material Control is a record that simply feels good to have, specifically at the end of 2017—a time when everyone’s coming together to praise the year’s most agreeable rock records, when every day brings further proof that the arc of the moral universe has gone way the fuck off course, when you just want to scream into the void. Think of Material Control as a post-hardcore Long Island tea: it’ll take you back to being a teen when you could care less what was in it and how it was mixed together. The only thing that mattered was whether you got knocked on your ass.
