The members of the Queens, New York-based outfit Psalm Zero have impressive underground pedigrees: Frontman Charlie Looker is an alum of Extra Life, Zs, and Dirty Projectors, and former co-frontman Andrew Hock, formerly of Castevet (and no longer with Psalm Zero: While he’s on this record, he was dismissed in February after allegations of unwanted sexual contact), is steeped in jazz improv. But on their sophomore album Stranger to Violence, their musical adventurousness starts to work against them. On opening track “Stranger to Violence,” and second track “Pay Tomorrow,” the pair combines guitar riffs straight out of the industrial metal playbook with unconvincing synths that could have been lifted right out of the wan pomp of Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” Van Halen’s 5150-era forays into keyboard fluff, or countless other forgettable c-grade hard rock songs from that same period. Clearly, Looker and Hock were looking to infuse their music with melody, a noble pursuit, but they went out of their way to flirt with a cheese factor that doesn’t serve the music.
On paper, Stranger to Violence offers a new route through the fertile valley between metal and new wave. Looker’s voice and phrasing, for example, recalls Morrissey, Joey Ramone, and Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman all at once. Looker’s vocal tone immediately splashes fresh context—and sensitivity—onto Hock’s coldly mechanical guitarwork, which follows in the footsteps of Godflesh, Prong, and Voivod at their most dissonant. But Looker and Hock don’t initially extract the full potential from these contrasts. Crude, tinny electronic drumbeats barely do more than function as demo-grade placeholders and don’t come anywhere close to the personality or menace that Godflesh were able to convey with far more limited drum-programming methods at their disposal.
Once you get past the first two songs, though, the album’s contrasts get richer, even if they don’t necessarily deliver on their promise. Looker’s voice may possess the timbre of the aforementioned vocal icons, but he is unable to move through his phrases with their flexibility. That said, his reflective, humane lyrics about mass-scale problems like imperialistic Western dominance (“Real Rain”) and global economic collapse (“Pay Tomorrow”) mesh well with his more personal outlooks on addiction (“Oblivion’s Eye”) and Jewish identity (“Not Guilty”). And as the album progresses, the pop touches undercut the seriousness of those lyrics with additional layers, rather than hollow them out as they do on the first two songs. Either way, hearing synth figures that recall the giddy celebration of ‘80s radio makes you do a double-take, a mismatch of moods that Looker intended to play up.
Likewise, Hock’s wiry guitar tone offers a change of pace from the predictably leaden guitars that have become de rigeur in contemporary heavy music. As a lifelong fan of Depeche Mode going all the way back to the first cassette he ever bought, it’s easy to see where Looker got his affinity for spartan arrangements. And as Stranger to Violence grows more compelling and its sonic quirks sound more natural on the ear, Looker and Hock’s facility with chord changes becomes more apparent, as does the inventiveness of some of their choices.
The meditative chant that opens “Real Rain,” for example, falls right into place beside Godflesh/Fudge Tunnel-style growling, and Looker sounds perfectly natural alternating between both approaches. “Not Guilty” starts out, typically enough, with a strobing tremolo guitar throb until a horn hook lifts the song from convention and sends it halfway to the renegade jazz mentality of Steely Dan. And by closing the album with the one-two punch of “White Psyche” and “Oblivion’s Eye,” Psalm Zero prove they’re perfectly capable of rewarding listeners with a dramatic payoff that they manage to sustain for a total of 15 minutes.
But Hock’s guitar riff on the verse of “Stolen by Night” highlights this album’s central issue: it takes a moment to notice how Helmet’s Page Hamilton could have written it, and that’s because it lacks Hamilton’s inimitable grit and flair. In fact, Helmet, Killing Joke, Katatonia, and the rest of Psalm Zero’s progenitors all possessed that intangible “it” factor that continue make their work instantly recognizable to this day. Even recent output by those bands oozes with character that this album, for all its efforts, simply can’t match. As a quirky bastard offspring of industrial, metal, and new wave, Stranger to Violence anchors itself in a decidedly modern brand of stress. But it’s hard to listen to it without being drawn back to the times when Psalm Zero’s influences made their own hybrids with far greater authority.
