Today is the Day - Never Give In

A long-term curiosity and pusher of boundaries, Today is the Day, is an outsider’s outfit with few rules. Led by dissident brainchild, Steve Austin, a psychological anxiety monger who has released challenging, leftfield music for three decades or more. Never Give In could be a mocking title because this is certainly not rousing nor uplifting but a fully committed venture into disturbed paranoia and self-loathing.

This release encompasses influences of agitated arthouse rock, surf rock, light industrial, post punk, experimental and jazz. The only real predictable element of Never Give In is that this is a fidgety bad trip. Aside from that, you cannot be completely sure what will ensue. The looped industrial heavy riff of the opening track Divide and Conquer is like Killing Joke and Static X jamming post-punk. The tightness of the track’s composition starts to come undone into a swirling, morass of panic and confusion charting a downward psychological trajectory. You could easily imagine Trent Reznor covering I Got Nothin’ with it being a rawer, more organic and hungover cousin of Nine Inch Nails or repetitive stamping of Ministry. A trashy, inverted mock-homage to glam, Intentional Psychological Warfare is a sordid, discomfiting arthouse trauma-rock, like someone out of their face shambling across thronging multi-lane smoggy freeways. Lurching, underground jazz dimensions are added with brass instruments in the likes of the brat n roll of Secret Police, a late night, embittered circular, disturbed trope.

Austin’s vocal delivery is mostly quasi-spoken word or muttered sometimes backed by spitefully pan-fried hisses. He is sometimes like a vicious, saturnine Lou Reed, intensive, angrily pensive and misanthropic. Song structures tend to built on a single refrain and magnify in volume or layering, emphasising a developing sense of anxiety and latent violence. Indeed there is an unspoken violence and vague volatility within Never Give In that doesn’t need to rely on sheer volume for impact.  Austin creates a personalised mental hellhole and will bottle anyone who approaches. In this bar, there is no happy hour. This  intriguing album is written from an intensely personal perspective and was not created with the listener’s wellbeing in mind, a feel bad hit of the summer.

Here is a link to Bandcamp for Today is the Day:

https://todayistheday.bandcamp.com/album/never-give-in