Loser’s Intuition

 The year 2001 was something of a last-call borderline, when even the final holdouts could still pour their share of rage into the melting pot of a freshly formed genre – metalcore. In the case of a band that took its name from a rather forgotten figure from the film world, Nora Diniro, it’s hard to claim these are rookies with no prior experience, or that the album Loser’s Intuition is the raw form of an uncut diamond, since the guys already had three EPs under their belts. Since 1998, when they launched a frontal assault alongside The Dillinger Escape Plan, they’d been serving up heavy riffs, screams of revolt and sweat-and-blood-soaked HC metal to hordes of hungry kids well beyond their home turf of New Jersey, and they even threw in the promise of murder for a dollar (the second EP, from 1999, is called Kill You For A Dollar, and it was immediately followed by another outpouring of bodily fluids in the form of the EP The Neverending Youline). Parting ways with Severson’s label Ferret Records let them test their chops and drive as a full-blooded band. The five-piece, made up of vocalist Carl Severson, the guitar tandem of Matt “Portland” Haick and Steve Jeff, bassist Mike Olender and drum lunatic Chris Ross, was ripe for its full-length debut, which was meant to shake up an already rather sleepy HC scene, while under the pretense of being a metalcore band they also wanted to lure in metalheads from all corners into a warm and inviting embrace. In the year of the terrorist attack on the USA, it’s time for revolt, catharsis and flipping the bird to every manipulator – Loser’s Intuition is just one grenade in a battery of shots fired at the system of repression.

In a half-hour salvo of controlled noise and screams, the album conjures schizophrenically claustrophobic pictures and imagery from everyday life, which Nora pour into ten vignettes that classically reflect the dark sides of discontent, the urge to rebel, and hopelessness. It’s latent aggression channeled along the ear canals straight into the panic center of your little brain. And just a hair away is the pleasure center, where amid the pain and whatever suffering you might even get an erection, or a meditative lift of consciousness. The mantra is simple: if everything’s going down the drain anyway, you have to do something, and stop the collapse of moral and mental devastation and the wiping out of the last scrap of humanity.

The album kicks off with a goodbye right away – ‘Wave Goodbye’ is a song about the drive for personal advancement and growth, and in the naked pursuit of it we can easily forget and lose sight of the things that really matter in life. The song takes on the principle, and the motivational shot in the arm, of the logic that “you have to win at all costs”. The road to the goals matters as much as the goal itself. What some consider success can therefore often be stained and smeared with the blood of those we stepped over on the way up, and dirty moral compromises hollow out even the most glamorous state after a hollow victory. Being a winner is temporary – a guilty conscience lasts forever. And they scream it at you in a guttural roar without hesitation, with the screamo blast of the intro followed by a disharmonic volley of everything after it. ‘My Bloody Clownsuit’ is about waking up after they tried to prep our brains in the bloody bath of daily bombardment by TV news. We’ve gotten used to sitting in front of little screens and slurping up info about murders, suffering, death and abuse from all over the world, and when you realize that, you can spin into a dance of madness and the grotesque realization that we’ve switched off our sense of compassion. We react to blood no more than we do to the ads that follow the block of devastating dehumanization. Fairly trivial, but a very nicely handled theme, with which Nora grow closer to your heart and maybe loosen the stuck cogs between your left and right ear. Because we don’t always have control over how we walk our paths, even though we live in the belief that we’ve got everything under control.

The other option Nora offer you is a sense of responsibility toward everyone close to us, handing out useful advice even if we choose a path entirely of our own. And that’s what the frequently halting, stop-and-go noisecore outburst of monotonous HC thunder called ‘Warthog’ is about. ‘Bring It’ is a vow, a state of mind where we yell and honestly mean that we’ll never do something again! We learn from our mistakes, after all, and if we’ve got enough guts and willpower, we can avoid repeating what we’ve already learned. The song is about survival. It’s about having the right to choose a better path, and the only thing that counts is strength of mind and the will to keep going with the choice you made. The painting of pictures we all know so well, but which have never sounded so angry, barking and aware, goes on with an intermezzo in which they tell you they couldn’t care less about global success, and want to assure you that what they sing is also the skeleton of who they are and how they live, and that they seriously mean it. Nora are no clowns who could be manipulated to the point of serving up their own balls dipped in chocolate and sugar just to please you; they stay sworn to their mission as musical HC preachers.

‘Nobody Takes Pictures Of The Drummer’ is only an episode in this string, but the continuation and second half of the album flow all the more smoothly. Brains and rebellion have liquefied, and information flows more fluidly toward the center of your humanity. ‘For The Travelers’ is a cliché that draws on the sound and rage bursts of the NYHC crowd and the likes of Agnostic Front, but it’s much closer to ‘Leadpipe Moment’, which we all know: the fear that ever-growing pressure on our part will crush us into dust. What counts is that in spite of everything we’re able to get up in the morning with a smile on our face and feel the easy beat of an unburdened heart. The only loser in life is the one who can’t stand in front of the mirror, look themselves in the face and give themselves a smile. Nora simply quarter a loser like that and pour them into the form of the perfect target for stoning such characters. To be honest, I find it hard to imagine that after a salvo of screaming like this, any of the five could flash the crowd a smile that wouldn’t look at least a little tired and twisted by the anger they spew at you from the first beat on. ‘

Loser’s Intuition’ is that wicked voice of a schizophrenic little devil at the back of your subconscious, the one that shoves us into depression every now and then, and in just under three minutes this time they don’t offer a single bright spot, light or solid footing as you wade through hopelessness. ‘Mudmonster’ is a song about the ethnocentric white guy. Icons of tradition, cultural indoctrination and religion have often pushed women into a second-class position. The song is practically a feminist call to arms and to beat down the oppressors of equality. Offenders get punished with screams of revolt, raised fists and the weight of newly set social norms. A very likable overture to the big finale, where they serve up the first studio track – ‘Kill You For A Dollar’! The point is that real change lies in the little things that keep our lives upright or leave them lying in the mud and rotten filth of a miserable everyday. It takes only a little to make things better. And after the last salvo of the chorus they flatten you with the realization “It could be so much better than this!” and, well, damn it – they’re right.

Nora are preachers who offer a recycling of what we’ve already heard, so they in no way count having invented anything new among their main musical achievements. It’s about attitude and style, with which all five take a stand against the principle of, forgive the bluntness, pissing into the wind. The record Loser’s Intuition is a fairly two-dimensional foundation for anyone in 2001 to dare claim that Nora delivered their very best. What they delivered was bile, anger and a full-body waxing of every limb you exposed to the speakers. Still, there’s something so attractive in this toxic mix of HC and metal that you get hooked on the cruel flow of thoughts to the point where the state of aching spirit and body actually starts to feel good. It may not be the peak of poetry, but Nora have poured you a full glass of heart, and they’ve seasoned the simple imagery just enough that you’ll undoubtedly reach for the record again.