Birds In Row
Personal War

A marathon can be tumultuous and fraught with difficulties. The metaphor of daily life as a routine marked hour by hour, action by action, in an endless succession of events is not even that new. It is well-trodden ground in realms like those tread by hardcore punk. It's also not surprising that a band from a small town like Laval, nestled in Mayenne, in the northwest of France, with a gaze aimed at a distant Atlantic Ocean, manages to capture the essence of that deafening monotony and tranquility that can characterize the urban outskirts. A flat calm capable of boring the mood. A calmness that arouses a desire to escape and evade. A whirlwind from which one can emerge battered, with scars to mend, where one fights always and only with oneself. Enter “Personal War”, which has the task of catapulting the Frenchmen back into their personal Odyssey, built on neurotic and emotionally unstable hardcore.

We last left Birds In Row shouting “the hope is saving” in “You, Me & The Violence” with vocal cords ready to shatter. Three years later, we find them submerged in an even bleaker and incendiary scenario. The stories that B. tells are not only disillusioned but are enriched with a personal drama that flows vigorously into the tormented poisoned world that inspires chaotic assaults. In the frenzied bursts, Birds In Row never lose clarity; indeed, there is always a sense that they are absolute masters of the coordinates on which they want to lay waste. This is their strength. An overflowing personality that slowly perishes under the blows of a forced apathy. Our protagonists are not cynical, at most they have become so. They do not hide at all how contemporary society arouses in them a lacerating repulsion. It is an awareness that leads them to want to react, refusing to collapse to the ground. Their introspective vision creates the explosive chemical formula to musically translate all these suffering impressions. The fire spreads thanks to one of the most expressive scratches in the hardcore scene, that of B. Listening to “Personal War” indeed you can only imagine him there on stage, hunched over, twisted on his Rickenbacker, with veins on his neck ready to burst, with an expressive charge fueled by the poetic dimension of the lyrics.

It's not easy to shed one's own fragilities, to forget the past, or to try to resist the vipers that, at the doorstep, press ever harder. One is frightened, and uncertainties devour in the darkness a torch submerged in the most suffocating darkness. In the seven tracks of “Personal War”, you will find seven portraits of what it means to put emotions and feelings into hardcore. Each time the Birds In Row change the game. From “Intro” to the conclusive escalation of “Marathon”, precise songwriting choices isolate and conceive specific sonic interweavings. In simple terms, B., Q. & T. know how to shape themselves according to the atmosphere they wish to convey. From distressing frenzy, through more unhealthy and expanded paths, until reaching dizzying climaxes that taste like a point of no return. In just eighteen minutes, there are all the images that Birds In Row wish to conjure, without giving clear directions, but rather blurring into post-hardcore and noise digressions. At the end of “Personal War”, one arrives exhausted due to the intensity released by our protagonists who, after a 2014 marked by uncertainty, have returned more determined and hungry than ever. Also because, to quote them:

“This marathon has no end I know, but all I can do is run. And I forgive my legs when they burn. And they burn.”