No Sir, Nihilism Is Not Practical — Showbread

No Sir, Nihilism Is Not Practical is Showbread's first album for Tooth & Nail. Solid State, Tooth & Nail's heavy label, put it out on October 19, 2004. It's thirteen songs in about fifty-four minutes, every one written by singer Josh Dies, and it gets an 8/10.

How it started

Showbread formed in Guyton, Georgia, in 1997. Patrick Porter and Travis Riner started it as a worship band for the Southern Baptist church they went to. Then the music got heavier, and the church asked them to leave. It thought the songs were Satanic. Patrick's younger brother, Josh Dies, joined on drums and ended up as the lead singer and main songwriter.

So the band took its name as a reply. Guitarist Matt Davis told Kerrang it's "a biblical reference that Jesus used to show how Christianity isn't so much about rules but about love." By 2004 there were seven of them. Josh Dies and Ivory Mobley shared lead vocals. Davis and Mike Jensen played guitar, Porter played bass, Marvin Reilly played drums, and John Giddens played keytar and synths. They'd toured for two years with no manager, no booking agent and no label before Tooth & Nail signed them. On stage they all wore black and red, because, as Davis put it, they were "like a small army travelling around."

Sylvia Massy produced and mixed the album. She'd made records with Tool, Johnny Cash and Prince, and she also turns up on it herself, singing and playing Mellotron and theremin. Reese Roper of Five Iron Frenzy sings on Stabbing Art to Death and Matthias Replaces Judas.

What you're hearing

The band called it "raw rock," and Davis explained what that meant to Cross Rhythms. "It's basically high energy rock and roll with an element of whatever the heck we feel like putting in there at that particular time," he said. "We aren't hardcore, we're not punk, we're not rock, we're just real raw rock."

That's a fair description. The record lurches from screaming hardcore to pop-punk hooks to keyboard squiggles and back, sometimes inside one song. Mobley and Dies trade off, and sometimes one screams a line while the other speaks it. The song titles tell you the band's sense of humor before a note plays. The album opens with A Llama Eats a Giraffe (And Vice Versa) and later gets to If You Like Me Check Yes, If You Don't I'll Die. Welcome to Plainfield Tobe Hooper names the horror director, and BrooklynVegan read Sampsa Meets Kafka and the closer, The Bell Jar, as signs the band pulled from classic books as much as from the Bible.

Mouth Like a Magazine was the lead single, and it's the song they made a music video for. It's about gossip, and it's the catchiest thing here. Dead by Dawn follows the opener at full tilt, and And the Smokers and Children Shall Be Cast Down stretches past five minutes.

What the critics said

At Jesus Freak Hideout, Josh Taylor gave it 4 out of 5. He placed the band "somewhere between pop/punk and hardcore." He noted the keytar and the synths, which he said gave the disc an almost techno feel at times. He said some of the band's best moments came when they toned it down to a pop-punk feel, but that they were truly gifted at the heavy stuff too. He called it "an obnoxious, raucous, and mind-blowing fifty-four minutes of music that rarely slows down," and warned that it wasn't for everyone.

At Cross Rhythms, Greg Sammons said the band deserved every bit of the praise it was getting. He praised the range, from quiet acoustic songs to the screamo and hardcore parts. His picks were the opener, Mouth Like a Magazine and So Selfish It's Funny. But he said the album fit together so well that it was better heard start to finish.

AbsolutePunk gave it 76 percent, and AllMusic's Alex Henderson gave it 3 out of 5. The mainstream rock press noticed too. Metal Hammer and Kerrang both interviewed the band, and Davis told Cross Rhythms they'd just had "a big write up in Revolver."

Years later, the record still had friends. In a BrooklynVegan list of 25 chaotic hardcore, mathcore and sasscore albums from the 2000s that are seminal today, Andrew Sacher said the band hopped between "sassy hardcore, raw screamo, radio-friendly alternative rock, glittery synths, industrial noise, somber folk music, melodic indie rock, and so much more." He added that the whole thing "would feel a little too ridiculous if the end result wasn't so damn satisfying."

Faith up front

Showbread never hid what they believed. Davis told Metal Hammer, "Basically we're a band who love our fans and love doing this and it's because we love Jesus Christ. That offends a lot of people out there and that's okay by us." On Cross Rhythms radio, asked whether the Christian tag would hold them back, he said, "We know that God's going to open the doors that he wants to open up and keep the ones closed that he's not."

The odd part is who they upset. Some Christian listeners pushed back on the band's lyrics and lifestyle, and BrooklynVegan noted that certain Christian groups even called them "satanic." Their first church had said much the same thing. The record answers the way the band's name does. It's loud and strange, and Cross Rhythms still heard it as one of the most openly Christian albums Tooth & Nail had out.

How it did

BrooklynVegan called No Sir the band's breakthrough. Showbread had played Cornerstone that summer, and they quickly built a strong following. The album came out in Britain's mainstream shops through Golf Records and in Christian stores through EMI CMG. The band moved toward plainer alternative rock on Age of Reptiles in 2006, again with Massy producing, and they left Tooth & Nail in 2010. In February 2020, Indie Vision Music reported that the lineup that made the album was getting back together to play it in full at Furnace Fest.

Where the score lands

Here's why it's an eight. Hardly anything else on a Christian label in 2004 sounded like this. Seven people, two singers, a keytar and a producer who'd worked with Tool somehow made a record that hangs together. Mouth Like a Magazine is a great single, and the faith in it is blunt without being preachy. So why not a nine? Fifty-four minutes is a lot of this much noise, and a few of the stretches between the best songs blur into each other. The jokes in the titles are funnier than some of the songs behind them. And why not a seven? Because the best of it is better than almost anything its scene put out that year, and two decades on, it still sounds like nobody else.

Watch

Mouth Like a Magazine leads with its official music video. After it come the album versions of Dead by Dawn and And the Smokers and Children Shall Be Cast Down.

Where this album sits on Loud Faith

No Sir came out the same year as They're Only Chasing Safety, and it's the wilder, stranger cousin of that record. If you like the chaos of Norma Jean's Bless the Martyr and Kiss the Child but wish it had more hooks and a keytar, start here. It belongs on our hardcore shelf, right where the screaming meets the sing-along.