Heel – ‘The Parts We Save’ [Review]
In a culture completely dominated by music with all the depth of a raindrop, where music videos commonly feature suited and booted guys treating barely-dressed women as property, intelligent rock bands and kickass frontwomen are needed now more than ever.
Heel are here to deliver what we need.
The Parts We Save frequently feels on the edge of falling apart, marking it as an album located light years away from the soulless and sterile pap dumped into the mainstream on a daily basis. An Apology starts off with harsh feedback and tortured string bending before Margarita’s vocals enter, laying out lyrics upon a foundation as solid as granite. This is a truly great rock track – and it’s the first of ten.
Heel don’t seem much interested in keeping things old-school and authentic – and thank fuck for that. Any approach that results in great music is fine in my book, but the most rewarding thing about running TMMP is the moment you realise that you’ve just discovered a band willing to mix things up and inject their own personalities in there too, resulting in something that stands head and shoulders above the rest. The Parts We Save delivers plenty of those moments.
Rock, punk, grunge, shades of the old-school, the alternative, and the fresh and modern…all are fair game for Heel, and they make the most of the freedom afforded by a total lack of inhibition. Yellow & Bliss mixes and matches time signatures under spaciously reverbed vocals and walls of guitar; Nothing New takes aim at lazy critics; Shatter briefly brings to mind the likes of Foo Fighters and Paramore (although in the latter case, we’re talking very briefly); Cool spices up a plaintive breakup song with flamboyant chord choices; and Live This Forever‘s super-intense intro proves a serious standout moment, along with the fascinating, exotically churning jam Keep Running Back To Me. By the time final ballad Streets Full Of You glides by in a haze of sparkly guitars and deep-impact basslines, you’ll be ready to press Repeat and listen to this whole set, an album that works as an album, all over again.
The Parts We Save is a great long-player – but it’s likely to fall victim to a couple of pointless critical barbs that bear addressing. One will take the form of inevitable comparisons between Margarita and the likes of Courtney Love or (this one’s 100% guaranteed) Hayley Williams of Paramore – and to be honest, there are a couple of moments where they’ll make sense. But a handful of moments scattered across a ten-song set don’t really justify those kinds of dull, overdone comments.
The second may well be the guitar solos. There are a fair few in there – and to my ears, they’re badass. Far more than just the sum of their notes. But, as always with any solo spots, there will be a fair number of people who dismiss them as being overly showy.
At the end of the day, rock music of this kind of quality is a serious rarity right now – and Heel represent rock done right. More than anything else, the fact that these guys are expressing themselves however they please – mixing influences, bringing out the OTT licks at exactly the right moments, etc – is a fucking good thing. More bands should be doing what Heel are doing.
A wicked, and wickedly satisfying, job well done.
TMMP RATING: 90%
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The Parts We Save drops March 4; check out Heel’s official website for more details.