After a five-year blitz which brought three studio albums, Paris-based post-hardcore band Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! have taken their time with album number four. ‘Gone Are The Good Days’ has been a long, drawn-out process that has had all the members toying with what they wanted to create.
Pumping out three albums in such a short space of time can be an exhausting experience and it’s good for bands to take a step back, relax and assess where they’re at. A five-year absence usually brings about an alteration in sound, a different approach to songwriting and an ulterior outlook. However, for Chunk! they have been adamant in staying true to their niche genre and it’s an approach that feels like a misstep.
‘Gone Are The Good Days’ has evidently been a painstaking process with Chunk! taking time to get back in the groove, and the result is a record that leaves you feeling as though you’re stuck in a timewarp. It has all the hallmarks of the records A Day To Remember and the myriad of their clones were putting out in the early 2010s and adds little to a decaying scene, struggling to keep up with an everchanging industry.
The tracks bleed into each other and rarely leave much of a lasting impression. Opener and lead single ‘Bitter’, starts with an intricate clean guitar riff backed by heavy distortion and it’s a promising start but as Bertrand Poncet’s vocals kick in, it feels like a song we’ve heard a million times before; the same vocal stylings with just the right amount of effects and the perfect level of pitch to make it sound like New Found Glory.
Everything about ‘Gone Are The Good Days’ is achingly formulaic. The vocals are too polished, the choruses are soaring and uplifting and then… wait for it… Ah yes. Here’s the metalcore breakdown. It’s a sound that many of their peers decided to ditch after the snakebite piercings, swoop fringes and ear stretchers that were all ditched in the early 2010s. Eleven years on, this record sadly feels as tired as the faded, punctured checkerboard Vans cluttering up your wardrobe.
When Chunk! break into the double bass drum and chugging mid-section of ‘Made For More’ it can only really be met with an eye-roll, as you realise all that’s missing is a guest spot from the latest grindcore band. While it’s not necessarily bad, there’s simply no originality, and if close your eyes you’d be hard pressed to differentiate it from any of the hundreds of bands that played the Vans Warped Tour in the 15 years before its demise.
To their credit, Chunk! do like to throw a curveball in the form of a completely unexpected and, quite frankly, brilliant saxophone solo at the end of ‘Complete You’. It’s such a shock to hear a soaring, Blue Brothers-style horn section you may even have to stifle a surprised laugh at the sheer ridiculous nature.
There are other bright spots within ‘Gone Are The Good Days’, too. ‘Painkillers’ is a excellent, brooding post-hardcore track as Poncet speaks of inner demons, depression and helping those that in trouble. He screams “I can’t help you if you keep jumping in”, backed by driving guitar riffs, but it’s a rare, perhaps sole, triumph within this slog of a record.
Closer ‘Fin’ provides the level of grandiose and carries with it an aura akin to the more modern sound of Bring Me The Horizon. It’s tracks like this that show there was infuriating promise in ‘Gone Are The Good Days’ but it’s a promised that’s never realised, held back by Chunk!’s desire to stick to a dying genre. That original sound they pine for was consigned to the bin along with your favourite nightclub in 2011 and the band’s determination to cling on to it is to their own detriment. While they, themselves, may consider this the “masterpiece of their career”, in reality its wholly forgettable.
The good old days of neon drenched pop-hardcore-punk maybe long gone but Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! are still playing like it’s last orders at the local rock club and the DJ has just put on ‘Dear Maria, Count Me In’. Unfortunately for Chunk!, no-one wants that anymore.
TOM WALSH