Dutch outfit Antillectual recently lost their bassist, Tim van Tol, so I’d guess that Start from Scratch is the last record on which he’ll play. It’s a shame but the band have been around since 2000 and changes to line-up are hardly going to stop them at this point.
The band hail from the Netherlands – Nijmegen / Utrecht to be precise – and play melodic punk rock with a hardcore slant. It’s poppy, sure, but there’s chuggy palm-muting and fast-paced aggression aplenty. It’s a bit of a predictable comparison to make with a Dutch punk band, but I get a definite Undeclinable Ambuscade vibe – perhaps it’s just the Dutch accent singing in English over melodic punk – but Bad Religion are also a likely inspiration. Antillectual are more earthy and less abstract or ideological than BR, but they back up their hooky and melodic tunes with a mix of lyrics exploring both the personal and the political.
There’s little obvious filler present among these twelve tracks, although there are a few tracks which are a little weaker or make some odd choices. ‘The Hunt Is On’, for example, is a little bland and unmemorable, and ’Some of my best friends are meat eaters’ – a riff on the old “some of my best friends are black/gay/etc” cliché, I assume - bizarrely namechecks Pamela Anderson and Weird Al Yankovic. I concede that Weird Al’s career covers many decades but regardless those are two heavily 90s-esque names to drop. Then there’s ‘America’s Worst Role Model’; I suppose pop-punk is a fairly US-centric genre but it’s odd that Antillectual choose to tackle American social issues rather than those of their home nation.
Still, these are pretty mild criticisms in the face of what they do well. The album leads with ‘Every Crisis is a Moral Crisis’, featuring a memorable prog-rock style intro before kicking into the formula that dominates the album: fast and chuggy chord progressions in the verse, fat power chords and lead licks in the chorus. Lead vocals from Willem Heijmans are clean, distinct and melodic, with more aggressive barked backing vocals supporting him. The multiple vocals are best in ‘Our Hearts’, the album’s punchiest, stomping hardcore number: it’s not clear from the info I have available whether bassist Tim or drummer Riekus von Montfort provides the backing vocals, but whoever it is they take the lead in this song, with Willem providing backup duties. The song’s highly energetic and the refrain “with fire in our hearts” is well-suited.
There are plenty of other fine lyrical moments to pick out: the mid-pace ‘Buyer’s Remorse’ features the excellent if slightly nonsensical lyric “I hope our backs didn’t hurt your knives”, and there are a few songs which approach fairly unusual subject matter. These would be ’Kraken gaat door!’, a song about squatting and squatter’s rights, ’Chinese Takeover’, which I think is about declining Western economic and moral authority, the rise of China as a superpower, and subsequent opportunities for revolution in European, and ’Classic Themes Never Get Old’, which is anti- the anti-PC brigade – that’s a bugbear of mine too so I was pleased to see it here!
There’s not much here that’s going to blow anyone away, but Antillectual are confident and skilled at what they do and their songs exhibit as much diversity as it’s possible to hope for among melodic hardcore; little flourishes are liberally scattered throughout such as little angular mathy moments or rock lead widdling. There’s also a part of me which suspects that had I heard this record when I was 18, rather than 28, I would have found it a significantly more inspiring and enduring listen.
The last paragraph looks a little like damning with faint praise, so I’ll end by saying that Antillectual are a fine and impressive band, and one of the best melodic punk groups I’ve heard out of Europe in recent years. Here’s hoping they find a new bassist and keep on writing and touring.
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