If you’ve heard of Valient Thorr, the hirsute and heroic rock’n’roll five-piece stretched between Raleigh, N.C., and Richmond, Va., you’ve probably heard their creation myth, too: Decades ago, the band members were on a spaceship dispatched from their hometown of Burlatia, Venus, when a crash-landing temporarily stranded them in the college town wilderness of Eastern North Carolina. Try as they might, the spacemen have yet to fix the ship. Instead, they’ve passed the time with a rock group that tours incessantly, spreading warnings about the endless greed and impending catastrophe they’ve encountered on Earth with a great Pentecostal fervor. In front of swiveling riffs lovingly borrowed from Thin Lizzy, Rainbow and the like, leader Valient Himself has preached revolution and suspicion with an Iggy Pop-styled urgency, an alien trying to save himself and everyone around him from seemingly inescapable predators.
Of course, the problem with such origin tales is that they can sometimes overrun the actual work of the band behind them. For the last decade, Valient Thorr’s shout-out-loud anthems and frenetic live shows have often been the sidecar to their story, as it provides a ready diversion for an industry generally overloaded with narratives of four friends who met in college or found one another on Craigslist. The stranded Venusians offer intrigue. Sometimes, though, that anecdotal allure has prevented the band from being taken seriously; despite their pristine two-guitar attack and one of the most riveting frontmen around, they have been perceived as a gimmick, jokesters too taken with fantasy to commit to the reality of the world around them.
But as its title suggests, Our Own Masters-- the band’s sixth LP and first in three years-- finds Valient Thorr largely forgetting the spaceship and forgoing their skyward return for a more immediate and local redemption. Though all of Valient Thorr’s records have been, to some degree, about the problems of this world, Our Own Masters feels of our problems, too-- not only ready to proclaim them but also to claim them as the band’s own, issues to be stared down and solved and not simply yammered about. Our Own Masters is the first Valient Thorr album to feel less like a sermon than a spirited conversation.
They haven’t given up on the pronouncements of disgust and disappointment; “Master Collider” is a fortified hardcore sprint about apocalypse, reinvention, and salvation, a bell-tolling cry to beat back corruption with “the power to be free.” Valient Thorr even leads with an indictment on “Immaculate Consumption”, a smartly written and exuberantly delivered critique of American overspending that now seems so multigenerational and habitual that it’s hereditary. Importantly, Himself implicates himself, lambasting his own needs over any compulsion to help those around him. “Kick me in my grave,” he screams. “I feel like I’m fixin’ to die.” That moment of frustrated mortality suggests that Valient Thorr’s come a long way from a band that, in interviews, still embraces its interplanetary heritage.
Indeed, across most of Our Own Masters, Valient Thorr thrives upon a relatively fresh honesty and vulnerability. The incandescent “No Strings Attached”, for instance, offers a new benchmark for the group, finally turning “stormy weather” and “bills that we cannot pay” into launching points for solidarity and triumph. Valient Thorr’s built a worldwide network of tattooed and denim-clad “Thorriors” during their seemingly endless tours, and “No Strings Attached” finally capitalizes on that sort of fostered goodwill; it’s a love song to a world that these aliens still worry about but now belong to, and it’s one of the most winning songs they’ve ever written. The bruising “Good News Bad News”, meanwhile, finds Himself invoking Bad Brains and “counteract[ing] those who spread fear,” the thick riffs and relentless rhythm serving as the locomotive that pulls him through the awakening. He confesses that difficulties are just around the next hook, but that he’s got to take charge in dealing with them-- that is, the alien has come home to roost with his terrestrial burden, not to pass it along on someone else.
What’s most gratifying about this attitude shift is that it doesn’t mitigate Valient Thorr’s musical brawn; if anything, it’s only galvanized it. The 27-second sizzle of “Life Hands You Demons” and the outsized glory of “Call Off the Dogs” stand among Valient Thorr’s most riveting songs to date without standing apart from them. Self-absolved from their roles as alien emissaries and newly loaded with personal responsibility, they seem entirely recharged now, a veteran outfit bailing on one mission to start a better and more approachable one.
