ALBUM REVIEW: Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes – Sticky (International Death Cult)
Frank Carter is the heavily-tattooed singer known for the fierce intensity of his live shows with first Gallows and, more recently, the Rattlesnakes.
On the crest of a wave after third album, 2019’s End Of Suffering, took them to a career-best No 4 in the UK charts, they played the gig of their lives, headlining London’s Alexandra Palace.
Then, like every other working musician, they had the rug well and truly pulled from under them as the industry was closed down by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Forced to direct their pent-up energy elsewhere, Carter and guitarist Dean Richardson wrote Sticky, possibly the best album of their career so far.
Clocking in at just 28 minutes 27 seconds, it’s their shortest by some distance, but it’s all-killer, no-filler. Not one song hits the four-minute barrier, and a few don’t even make three.
Carter insists it’s not a lockdown album, but “a freedom record”, and it certainly seems to mark something of a new phase for the band.
They’ve melded hardcore punk with the pop sensibilities Carter displayed in post-Gallows band Pure Love, with the whole album based around infectious beats.
Lead single My Town, featuring Joe Talbot of IDLES, brings together two of modern punk’s best-known figures, and was a jaw-dropping appetiser for the album.
It’s about our collective mental health falling apart – something a lot of people will be able to identify with after the shitshow that was 2020-21.
Carter is no stranger to collaboration, of course, having made records with grime artist Lethal Bizzle as long ago as 2006.
Here, he’s joined by another big name in Bobby Gillespie on the closing Original Sin, with the Primal Scream man adding a deliciously sleazy feel to it.
Electro-pop artist Cassyette features on Off With His Head, adding a veneer of glam, while the banging single Go Get A Tattoo features a kindred spirit in queer underground electro-punk sensation Lynks.
Carter unleashes his frustrations at being unable to fulfil a lifelong ambition of opening his own inking studio because of the pandemic, and it’s another of the album’s standout tracks.
The guests have one thing in common. “They’re all underdogs,” says Carter, or, as Richardson – who produces the band for the first time puts it, “outsiders”.
Previous albums have found Carter screaming himself hoarse at times. Here he still rails against injustice, the patriarchy, right-wing politics and toxic masculinity, but his rage is, for the most part, contained.
Songs like Bang Bang, Take It To The Brink and Cobra Queen show us a band with a broader appeal, without alienating fans of their older out-and-out hardcore material.
Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes take Sticky on the road in November. On this evidence it promises to be a very special tour indeed. 9/10.
