Review: Reuben - In Nothing We Trust

Out today Reuben's third album In Nothing We Trust is quite simply one of the most surprising releases of 2007. From the opening strains of 'Cities On Fire' you have no idea what to expect. It's loose, clear guitar clashes seem to waver on the brink of falling apart. Suddenly Jamie's fiercest venom is hacked up with some volcanic chord shapes. The track exhumes some long forgotten art of tearing your face off. An opener to be reckoned with. Within a couple of minutes it's changed tack to a solid, chilling singalong, something you'd never have thought Reuben were capable of if you'd only listened to second album, and rather laboured anchor record, Very Fast, Very Dangerous. "Where are your books and your memories?" Jamie asks while his guitar spins out a web of triplet notes, as if firing hundreds of tiny barbs toward your ears. "We BURNED them all......We BURRRRRRRNNEEEEEEDDDD!!!!!" It's all shockingly good. And that's only the first four minutes of the album.
We then get the unassailable 'We're All Going Home In An Ambulance'. I guess you could call this typical Reuben from 'Blamethrower' or 'Freddy Kreuger' era singles. Except it's close to six minutes long. Screams, violent kick drums, disjointed chord stabs all break out into a riff that sounds like a juggernaut about to flatten your house. A terrace chant to rival the skull crushing thuggery of a Millwall gang jeers before a heavy metal, palm-muted breakdown defies any time signature. At this point we're barely three minutes in. A quick drum flourish leaves the bass grinding away while Jamie's pained arpeggios slip over the top. Before long we're back into a singalong that establishes itself into an outro of gobsmacking adrenaline.
These two songs are indicitive of what you should expect - Racecar Is Racecar Backwards on synapse wrecking steroids. And yet so much more. It is the best Reuben album by a long way. The other surprise on the album is the beautiful acoustic lament 'Good Luck'. With a lyrical approach that references itself as childish and "not progressive", it's left all that more poignant. If you've ever been sacked or dumped or just plain disappointed (that's all of us then), this will have you chanting the pay off line "If you hurt me, I will hate you, If you hurt me, I will erase you."
There are songs here which sound utterly ridiculous at first: 'Deadly Lethal Ninja Assassin' initially sounds like an Offspring song, but it's undeniably catchy and has YET another excellent outro. Frank Turner joins in seamlessly with the final lines and it's another triumph for the British underground rock troupe.
'Crushed Under the Weight of the Enormous Bullshit' starts as a horror movie stabbing (listen and see what I mean) while namechecking Everytime I Die and Glassjaw's Worship & Tribute while Jamie points out that your initial excitement about music is so hard to recapture.
Agony/Agatha has Jamie explaining the song as the band play, bit by bit. "Just a big bass line and drums, got guitarists sucking their thumbs for a bar or two that's how to do it...." It's almost like some sort of post-modern songwriting course for rock fiends. It's brilliant.
Perhaps the highlight, paradoxically, is the very Reuben-esque 'An Act of Kindness'. It propels itself along familiar lines and rhythms but with all the confidence and learned approach of a band who've been doing this for more than long enough. A final mention must go to 'Suffocation Of The Soul', Reuben's 'Kashmir'. An epic seven minute track that suffuses drum machines, molten guitars, blended vocals and an intense final rock out to match, and thump into the ground, pretty much any American metal band you can mention.
So, what we have is Reuben finally delivering an album that can encompass all we thought Racecar... promised and the fury of their I-can't-believe-there's-only-three-of-them live show. It's been a long time coming but we can finally embrace them as we always should have.
What's surprising is that we ever doubted them at all.