Double Dagger More

If Double Dagger were blog commenters, they would probably post their screeds in all caps, ornamenting them with underlines and exclamation points clustered together like prison cell bars. More is the band’s third full length album and their debut for Thrill Jockey, and it’s a relatively mature work of lo-fi white boy angst. Irony – that characteristic so prominent in indie rock – is something they usually eschew in favor of blunt sarcasm (“Nepotism is our party line. This incest suits me just fine.”). Subtlety is not the goal, here. Fueled by anger, energy and ludicrous levels of testosterone, the straightforward punk on More is better than it has any right to be, considering the disillusionment that followed the hardcore movement.

The band’s minimalist approach should distract more than it does. Massive art rock soundscapes, like those of Fucked Up, have no place in a band that consists of only drums, bass, and vocals. Not a brilliant technician on the bass, Bruce Willen compensates by bringing as much intensity and noise as possible, tremolo picking on the high strings and creating tension with walls of amp feedback. Straying not an inch from the hardcore tradition, vocalist Nolen Strals has two dominating vocal dynamics: too loud and way too loud; and the lyrics are every bit as fierce as his tone and the backup instrumentation. On No Allies, he offers what sounds like an inverted beatitude, shouting, “One day, you’ll be the one that’s gotten old. And you’ll be all alone, left out in the cold.” It’s a sermon he delivers not from a mount but from a city sewer beneath the capital building.

At times, More seems to capture Double Dagger on the road to adulthood, occasionally giving in to melody and allowing for such complicated and un-punk emotions as nostalgia and vulnerability: “When we were young it was so easy. It was just us and them, and them and us. There was this tension all around us.” It’s telling that, by their third album, they’ve become more personal. The divisive hardcore mentality just doesn’t make sense in 2009, and they seem to know it.

The hope is that Double Dagger will be able to progress further, but the question is whether their aesthetic and ideology will allow them to do so. One of the more intriguing things about American Hardcore, Paul Rachman’s scattered documentary on the punk of the early-to-mid eighties, was how it witnessed the differences between the punks who grew up (Minor Threat’s Ian McKaye) and the ones who did not. McKaye had to be in Minor Threat before he made Fugazi, whose albums are far more realized capsules of punk’s vision than his former outfit could have made. Now, Double Dagger seems to be in Minor Threat mode, and it will take at least another album to determine if it’s trapped there.