Flats - Better Living

Since I started listening to Flats' debut LP Better Living, the band have cancelled a full UK tour at short notice, pushed back the release of the record by about a month, and their lead singer has been sentenced to a period of rehabilitation in Pentonville Prison for drug use. Listening to the record, none of these things are entirely surprising – Better Living sounding like the work of  a band genuinely coming apart at the edges, rather than playing at it.

While there's been quite a lot of heavy music crossing into the alternative-mainstream in the last couple of years, a lot of the most obvious examples (Fucked Up and The Men spring to mind), for all their genuine ferocity, still have a slightly populist edge to them, an accommodating accessibility to their structures and delivery. Flats have no such thing. This is music which punishes first, and invigorates second – a refreshing (if that word can be used) reorganisation of recent hardcore's aims; heavy music searing like flames without even the most sideways of glances at current trends.

Opening track 'Foxtrot' is case in point at how little Flats care about alienating their listener, never chasing that faux-descriptor 'energy' often used to describe music that thinks face-shredding guitars are married by necessity to break neck speeds. Because not only is this grim, grimy, hellishly brutal music, it's also resolutely mid tempo; laced with doom and drained of the adrenaline you might expect from the punk-er recordings from the band's early period. Instead calling to mind a bygone metal era of Napalm Death or even Black Sabbath, the riffs drip with dread while lead singer Dan Devine demolishes your ears/his own throat. 'Frostbite' operates in similar territory – growling riffs combining with moping drum patterns, Devine scrawling his vowel sounds for as long as his larynx can handle. (Indeed, when I first heard that Flats had cancelled their tour, I genuinely considered it might be owing to a vocal-related injury on Devine's part. Songs like the searing 'Macabre Unit' boast the sort of vocal performance not conductive to longevity of career).

That's not to say they still don't go hell for leather on occasion – the beats per minute on the one and a half minute numbers like (the clue is in the title) 'Fast' still move with throttle of a band who want to ignite serious violence. But this is largely the exception rather than the rule – most of these songs hinge on repetitive, snaking riffs from the darkest, darkest peripheries of skate punk, bolstered by the complete nihilism of a man who – as it turns out – actually did end up in prison. Undoubtedly, a lot of these riffs are relatively regressive patterns; the sort of hardcore-do-you-want-more licks you heard from the band the metal-heads in your school played in during sixth form. But when it's delivered with such genuine ferocity and wretchedness, the execution more than justifies the often simplistic content. Not that Flats seem to care what you think or have to say about Better Living. They probably don't even want you to enjoy it.