Chevelle have hinted that they may have a new album out this year, so ‘Any Last Words?’ may only need to be a stop-gap for a matter of months - but in any case it’s an interesting way to take a look back at what they have achieved over the last ten years.
The track list is basically a greatest hits set, pretty evenly balanced across the band’s last four albums, but excluding any material from 1999 debut ‘Point #1’. Technically it falls outside the whole ‘10 year anniversary’ thing - which raises the rather succinct point that Chevelle had an album out 11 years ago, and have actually been gigging for more like 14 years. Perhaps they count it from the time they got signed to a major label…
'Any Last Words' Tracklisting
- Antisaint
- Jars
- Sleepwalking Elite
- The Clincher
- Shameful Metaphors
- Sleep Apnea
- Get Some
- Letter From a Thief
- An Evening with El Diabolo
- Send the Pain Below
- The Red
- Straight Jacket Fashion
- Vitamin R
- I Get It
What Chevelle do best, for the uninitiated, is crafting a selection of deliciously meaty down-tuned riffs and hooks, overlaid with a melodic chorus line which is catchy enough many a listener will find themselves mumbling along to it without ever really working out what they’re on about.
Take the chorus to ‘Jars’, for example; “We can’t both become the same pawn that’s made to fall/oil that tastes like blood/stole the summer scent from me to you/you’re stabbing me through you/you’re stabbing you through him” - puzzling stuff, to put it lightly, but it’s delivered in such an incredibly infectious, tuneful package that you can’t help but get into it.
Steve Albini's Production
One thing which has been a hallmark of Chevelle albums really right from the start is how well produced they are - even for their debut, they had Steve Albini in the booth. Thankfully, even in the raw environment of a live performance, lacking in the luxuries of post-production, the three-piece manage to pack as much punch and power into their songs as on record.
While this may be a greatest hits set, there is some room in there for less well-known songs - “Sleepwalking Elite“, for example, which only made it onto ‘Vena Sera’ as a B-side bonus track on the special edition, is an unexpected treat. The crowd react with delight to classics new and old, although for the most part it’s quite hard to tell - Chevelle make rather a lot of noise, enough to drown out the slaughter of a herd of bull elephants, never mind a mob of mild-mannered Chicagoans.
Strength of New Material
One complaint occasionally levelled at Chevelle is that across their 10-year career, their sound hasn’t evolved in the slightest - they haven’t really gone anywhere. While in terms of style this is broadly true, with each passing album the band have added a greater degree of refinement and polish to their songs, with each album seeming just a little bit better than the last, if not hugely different.
The live renditions of these songs are a good way to judge this, lacking all of the studio polish that the band have been rather used to employing across their five albums - and the fact is that the newer material is better. While the older tunes like “The Red” and “Send the Pain Below” from still rock as hard as they ever did, it’s the newer material like “Jars” and “Sleep Apnea” which stands out.
Overall this is a timely reminder of the strength of the band's back catalog, and it seems obligatory nowadays for a band to have at least one live album per decade. The progression visible in the bands songs, getting slightly stronger as time goes by, certainly bodes well for any forthcoming album if the band are heading into the studio - 'Any Last Words' whets the appetite not only for the next Chevelle album, but for the live tour that will surely follow.
Philip Sim - Philip Sim is a trainee journalist based in Aberdeen, Scotland. He graduated from the University of Dundee in 2009 with an honours degree ...
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