“That’s the way the guillotine claps,” Cedric Bixler-Zavala sings on Governed By Contagions. Released in December of last year, the song was the first taste of new At The Drive In material for 16 years. Preceding it you had one of the greatest albums of all time, a break-up, a reunion, another break-up and another reunion. So what exactly was the guillotine clapping on? The necks of critics? Or the band themselves?
This is a weird one. When the band put out ‘Relationship of Command’ in 2000, it was immediately recognised as one of the best post-hardcore albums ever made and would later be regarded as a seminal musical achievement full stop. So, much like Refused reforming and following up ‘The Shape of Punk to Come’ with a decent record 17 years later, At The Drive In can’t really win here.
They were never going to top ‘Relationship of Command’. The youthful rage, the bottled lightning, can never be replicated. But At The Drive In could’ve at least given it a go. They could’ve experimented with their sound a little, pushing the boat out even if it ended up with a few holes in it. That would’ve been commendable at the very least.
Instead, we’ve got ‘In•ter a•li•a’. At The Drive In’s fourth full-length opens with what appears to be a tape rewinding as No Wolf Like The Present attempts to kick us back to the year 2000 and fails.
Bixler-Zavala can’t pull off that crazed, nuanced delivery he had back in the day, instead settling into the role of a Bixler-Zavala impersonator. The founding fingers of Jim Ward, the rickety riffmaster who cemented At The Drive In’s signature sound, are also gone, with the guitarist’s place taken by Keeley Davis.
‘In•ter a•li•a’ is more an At The Drive In parody than a successor to ‘Relationship of Command’. The angular, deeply unsettling post-hardcore they made their name with is copied and pasted throughout, sometimes effectively but most of the time pretty shoddily. Tilting At The Univendor, for example, features a banging 4/4 groove for about 30 seconds, but any traction is halted by the wiry, paper-thin guitars that try so desperately to sound like Ward's best moves.
But parodies aren’t always bad. Although ‘In•ter a•li•a’ is more Meet the Spartans, a few Shaun of the Dead moments do crawl from the speakers. Holtzclaw features a classic, juicy breakdown and a timeless Bixler-Zavala quip: “Hope, the worthless currency.” Incurably Innocent, though, is undoubtedly the album’s highlight as the band abandon all pretence and focus on delivering a catchy, atmospheric punk song rather than trying to be as weird as At The Drive In naturally were almost two decades ago. Again, it’s nowhere near the best stuff in their catalogue, but an album stacked with Incurably Innocents would have fared much better.
And then we’re back to that grizzly December day. Governed By Contagions set out the stall for ‘In•ter a•li•a’ and is aptly representative of the record as a whole. It’s got that glorious “Brace yourself my darling, brace yourself my love” line, but then it’s also got a silly “Knock knock knock” bit that Sikth wouldn’t bother touching. It’s patchy. Inconsistent. It's lacking any new ideas, especially given the length of its gestation period. ‘In•ter a•li•a’ isn’t a terrible album, but it’s not good and by no means befitting of At The Drive In’s storied legacy.
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