Port Noir – Cuts
Release Date: 25th March 2021
Label: Despotz Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Progressive Dark Pop, Alt-Rock.
FFO: Royal Blood, Bring Me The Horizon, Enter Shikari.
Review By: Séamus Patrick Burke
How dark is too dark?
Swedish rock duo Port Noir sure want you to know that their latest LP Cuts is dark and intense. It’s all they talk about in the press releases. More than once, they mention they recorded without a click-track to maintain the intensity of their live shows.
Admirable, for certain. But the average music fan isn’t going to be interested in technical details like that, or the fact that Port Noir’s streaming numbers are up after sharing the stage with a plethora of famous acts. Their music has to live or die by what’s actually committed to tape.
There was certainly reason to be excited after the release of the first single, “All Class”. The grim, intense vibe matched wonderfully with the well-produced music video, inducing feelings of nostalgia, melancholy, melodrama, and ennui. It conveyed a sense of style and presentation that few rock acts bother with nowadays, and hinted that Port Noir was ready to play with the big kids.
Well, we sure hope you liked “All Class”, because almost every song on Cuts sounds like variations of that single.
The LP cycles through three songs for the majority of the runtime: compressed rock drums, thick-as-bricks synth bass, and jangly guitar from session player Andreas Hollstrand that sounds like surf rock from hell. Cuts is nuthin’ but nine tracks of that, with minor variations in the tempo, key, or even lyrical phrasing.
Now, granted, you don’t need much sonic variation to make a good rock record. We’re a metal review site, we know that better than anyone. But we also don’t expect the same mood from beginning to end. Even Ozzy Osbourne had the foresight to compose every song on Blizzard of Ozz in a different key so there’d be some measure of sonic diversity. With Port Noir, dark and intense is their only setting, so it makes listening to a humble nine-track LP into a monotonous, one-dimensional experience. What good is a vibe if it’s the only vibe you got? Port Noir calling themselves “progressive” is a laugh because any progressive group worth their synth pads know to add a key or tempo change occasionally, if for no other reason than to keep people on their toes.
In fairness, the second half is much stronger than the first. The homogeneity in the front half gets so smothering that the synth bass starts to feel like wading through peanut butter. But then we land on the penultimate song, “Monument”, where the drums switch to the rim and the synths gently wash over instead of blare in our ears. Port Noir name-check R&B as one of their genres, and while “Monument” hardly counts as R&B, the lush production is a welcome reprieve. Port Noir clearly have it in them to add more color to their sound, and it’s frustrating that they don’t here.
It also doesn’t help that the lyrics get tedious as well the more the record goes on. Frontman Love Andersson keeps defaulting to similar rhythms and even rhyme schemes. His frequent use of “Fuck” doesn’t sound edgy or intense, it sounds like someone trying to sound edgy and intense without fully committing to the bit. It reaches a nadir with album closer “Entertain Us” with the lyric “You fat fuck/You feel offended?” We’re sure Andersson wasn’t going for a “R U Triggered?!” vibe, but it doesn’t make the lyric any less eye-rolling. It reminds one of early Chevelle, when Pete Loeffler got overly breathy and couldn’t be bothered to put more than half a dozen words into a verse.
Port Noir aren’t without talent or potential. The influences from other groups like Royal Blood and Bring Me The Horizon ring true. But those groups learned how to stretch beyond the limits of their instruments and their sound. For all their talk about branching out, Port Noir are still firmly coloring inside the lines, and after a while it turns Cuts into a gray blob of synth-heavy mush.
(2.5 / 5)
