Duality of self, separation from wholeness.

I've been listening to Underoath for the better part of a decade now, and while it sometimes surprises me that I continue to play their records so frequently, all I have to do is listen to them again to realize why that is. Their music speaks to me on a deep level that most other musicians have been unable to reach. I'm still not at a point where I will tell people that they are one of my favorite bands, but in real terms, I probably play their records more often than those of the bands I do claim as favorites. This feels strange to me, for a variety of reasons. For one, as an agnostic with tendencies towards atheism, it's odd to feel such a deep connection to the music of an openly Christian band who regularly make reference to their religion in their lyrics. Furthermore, Underoath are generally regarded as music for teenagers who shop at Hot Topic. Their music is not regarded as serious, and the emotion that fuels it is seen as immature. The genres in which they can most easily be filed--metalcore, emo, screamo--are also seen as insubstantial; rockcrit types write them off as insubstantial, commercial in that they appeal to superficially rebellious teens who, again, will outgrow them by the time they're out of college.

And yet, for all that, I cannot help but love Underoath. The standard state of my emotions is also lumped into that immature teenaged pigeonhole, regardless of the fact that I'm in my mid-30s; our society's discussion of such things has no way of dealing with emotional problems that carry past adolescence besides labeling them as arrested development, which is a fact that I consider a failure on society's part. There absolutely is validity in the idea of emotional struggles continuing well into adulthood, and being part of our lives for most if not all of the time we're alive. I think maybe it even helps that Underoath are Christian; within a religious framework, they are given much more freedom to discuss issues like this openly and without risk of condemnation. In fact, I see Underoath's mindset as particularly advanced in light of the typical Christian mentality in America. Where a lot of American Christians follow the hard-right political party line of evangelical Christianity, buying into an idea of spiritual materialism that seems explicitly opposed to the teachings of Jesus Christ, Underoath have openly advocated for liberal political positions. Vocalist Spencer Chamberlain has also talked in interviews about his struggles with drug abuse and mental illness. That's probably why I've seen myself in so many of the songs they've written; their album Define The Great Line was a concept album about struggling with suicidal impulses, and finding the hope and the will to turn away from those thoughts and believe that life was worth living. This sort of doubt and struggle is something that mainline American Christianity usually has no room for. You won't find most religious figures admitting to any sort of doubt--they're all about their solid, unshakable faith. Underoath are a band who manage to straddle the line between religion and humanity, between faith and doubt, and when they speak from that position, the things they say and the emotions they express are ones that I relate to.

Their most recent album, Lost In The Sound Of Separation, has been harder for me to connect with than the two that came before. They're Only Chasing Safety was the first album to feature Spencer Chamberlain on vocals, and the first one that I really loved. Previously, with Dallas Taylor still on vocals, they'd done an album called The Changing Of Times, which featured one song I'd really liked, "While The Sun Sleeps." On that song, drummer Aaron Gillespie did some melodic vocals which, when contrasted with Taylor's screaming vocals, sounded pretty great to me. I loved the way they mixed melody with heaviness on that song. When the rest of the album was much more straightforward in its heaviness, though, I couldn't find as much to get into. The introduction of Chamberlain into the band on They're Only Chasing Safety really helped, though. Once Chamberlain was in the band, he and Gillespie traded off on vocals more often than not, and all of the songs focused equally on melody and heaviness. Sometimes it seemed a little silly for the band's drummer to sing quite as much as he did on that album, leaving the actual singer with little to do, but a more equitable balance was achieved on Define The Great Line. That, coupled with lyrical topics that reached me on a deep level, made it my favorite Underoath album thus far.

Lost In The Sound Of Separation had a lot to live up to, and while I was very excited for it, and rushed right out to buy it, I was always prepared for it to be a letdown. I liked it when I got it, so it wasn't a total disappointment, but when compared to the two previous albums, I found it a bit harder to get into. For that reason, once I got over the novelty of a new Underoath album, I put it aside, and went back to spending a lot more time with They're Only Chasing Safety and Define The Great Line. Even though I certainly liked it, I don't think I ever connected with Lost In The Sound Of Separation the way I had connected with those two. When I was playing Underoath this moring, it was They're Only Chasing Safety that I put on. But tonight, I thought about how long it had been since I played Lost In The Sound Of Separation and decided to give it a listen again. And tonight, I heard a few things in it that I'd never heard before--things that helped me find a way into an album that had previously been somewhat of a mystery.

The Changing Of Times was the first Underoath album that attempted to introduce melody into their sound. The focus was generally on heaviness, though, and the album suffered as a result. Lost In The Sound Of Separation is the heaviest, least melodic Underoath album since The Changing Of Times, but it would be inaccurate to say that it suffers. Five years ago, it seemed that their songs were effective in direct proportion to how melodic they were. In the intervening time, though, Underoath have learned to make their heavy parts just as interesting as their melodies, perhaps because, with the focus on heaviness decreased, they had to make those parts count. The result is that when, on Lost In The Sound, they decided to focus more energy on being heavy, they were able to apply lessons they learned in the interim, and make the songs better than they would have been in 2003.

That said, the melodies were the most accessible elements of Underoath's songwriting on the previous albums featuring Chamberlain on vocals. Whenever a chorus came around, Gillespie would take the vocal lead, with Chamberlain reduced to occasional screams as counterpoint, or punctuation. Those choruses were the payoff to the buildup in momentum generated by the heavy riffs. On Lost In The Sound, the choruses are often just as heavy as the verses. In fact, there are songs here on which Chamberlain's screams are the only vocals. Opener "Breathing In A New Mentality" is one of these, and while terms like "emo" are frequently used to describe Underoath, there's nothing emo about this song. This is straight up metallic hardcore. As previously mentioned, Underoath have learned to use heavy parts to build tension and increase momentum. On this song, though, they are not building towards a melodic chorus. Instead, the buildup, which is fed throughout the first half of the song by a fast hardcore drumbeat and Chamberlain's howling vocals, is leading up to a neck-snapping mosh breakdown that hits 90 seconds into the album. The riff chugs in fits and starts, seeming more appropriate for desperate flailing than anything as structured as the sort of fist-swinging martial arts moves that dominate the mosh pits at the kind of shows Underoath play. That desperate flailing is there in Chamberlain's lyrics too: "Oh God, my hands are shaking again," he screams, ordering himself to "calm down" as he narrates his panic: "I can't feel the floor, and my vision takes its toll on me. There must be some kind of mistake." This sounds like the narrative of a drug trip gone wrong, and considering what Chamberlain has revealed about his struggles with addiction, there's good reason to interpret this song that way. As it ends, he attempts to give himself a pep talk ("They say I'll never change--I'll prove them wrong"), but ends up on the floor, begging for mercy: "Clean me up, show me how to live. Let me start again."

Without pause, the band slams into the second song, which is given a long and thought-provoking title: "Anyone Can Dig A Hole But It Takes A Real Man To Call It Home." In light of the way the song starts, it's impossible to take this title as anything but sarcasm. "I'm no leader, I'm just a mess," Chamberlain screams as the band blasts through an uptempo hardcore riff. "That's not the way it's supposed to be, but it's the way it is." It's not clear what he's blaming himself for here, but there's obviously blame being placed as he ends the first verse with the line, "I've led us all astray again," then screams "Oh, how the plot thickens!" over a guitar lead that flows into the next riff. The lines he sings on the next verse strike me as particularly poignant: "We always assume the worst. I'm afraid no one's listening anymore." This is a feeling I know all too well. And the song continues in this vein for its entire first half until, at the end of the second verse, Chamberlain screams, "I should have been gone so long ago." At this point, the music drops back into a quiet, pensive lull for the first time on the entire album. Aaron Gillespie is still keeping time on his drum kit, tapping the rims of his snare and floor tom, but other than some feedback and volume swells from one of the guitarists, this is all we hear for about 10 seconds. And then, for the first time on the album, he begins to sing.

On previous Underoath albums, Gillespie and Chamberlain's vocal parts were so evenly balanced that they generally just finished each other's sentences and combined in other ways to sing a unified vocal narrative. They still do this most of the time on Lost In The Sound Of Separation, but with Gillespie's vocals appearing less often, it opens the door for his vocal parts to take a different role. On "Any Man Could Dig A Hole," his voice seems to represent a different point of view than is expressed by Chamberlain. It's tempting, in light of the Christian slant of Underoath's lyrics, to see Gillespie as the voice of god (in the same way that Dan Hoerner's backing vocals on Sunny Day Real Estate's "Song About An Angel" represent the voice of god speaking to lead vocalist Jeremy Enigk's human character), but the lyrics don't support this interpretation. Gillespie is here representing another side of the same character that Chamberlain is playing--and if Chamberlain is singing from his own point of view, then Gillespie is the positive voice in the back of his mind, providing counterpoint to the panicked doomsaying that is running things up front.

Gillespie's vocals begin during the quiet drum break halfway through "Any Man Could Dig A Hole," and while this is probably a trick done in post-production, it sounds like he's singing from the back of the room in which the band is playing, and his voice is being picked up by the mics on his drums. "I can't get away from it all," he sings, his voice echoing through the airspace taken up by the song. "I messed up like I always do." And suddenly, the entire band is playing again, and Gillespie's voice has jumped to the forefront of the mix. "I gave you nothing, I took you nowhere, but you're still listening." Of course, this is a prayer. And yet, for an agnostic like myself, it seems like something else entirely. If Chamberlain's vocal in the first half of the song is self-flagellation, a desperate plea for forgiveness, Gillespie's vocal here is a recognition that, regardless of whether he deserves it, he still has the love and support of his friends. I've been struggling a lot lately with an inability to be the best friend I can be; I haven't been there for people, and when I am around, I feel like a drain on the energy of everyone in the room with me. Social interactions are hard for me at the best of times, and lately, I feel so desperately lonely and unable to connect with other people that, when I do get around other people, I find myself taking actions to alienate them and embarrass myself. Sometimes it is truly incredible to realize that my good friends still love me, still want me around, even in spite of how hard I can be to deal with. What Gillespie is expressing here is something I feel quite often, even though I can be terrible at expressing it.

The "separation" of this album's title is clearly a reference to separation from god, from a completeness and perfection that humanity keeps from all of us. To someone who believes in the Christian religion, this perfection is something that they hope to achieve after death, but will by definition prove to be elusive in life. And yet, they feel they must always try to be a good person, to get as close as they can to living a perfect life, so that they can be worthy of god's love and respect. I don't know about any conception of god, but for me, this struggle is reflected in my struggle to be worthy of my own love and respect. My ideas of what's right, what's good, and how I should be living all shift and change constantly, but I'm always trying to be as close to them as possible. And again, because I am human, I know I can't ever fully get there. In this way, I feel a kinship with the struggles of Christians, even if I don't believe in their god. And Underoath spend much of this album attempting to capture the duality of the human condition, the distance between perfect ideal and imperfect reality.

One of the most interesting ways in which they focus on this separation has nothing to do with lyrics. "Emergency Broadcast: The End Is Near" is the first Underoath song that I've ever heard that can only be fully understood when heard through headphones. Aaron Gillespie's drums are separated into two tracks and panned to the extreme left and right of the stereo mix; it sounds like there might be two different drum parts being played, but at first, you can't really be sure. It might just be a post-production effect. But as the song goes on--and it is the longest song on the album, nearly six minutes in length--differences in the two drum tracks become obvious. In one speaker, there will be a fill, while in the other speaker, the drums just keep playing the beat. At one point, during a short bridge, the two different drum tracks keep time in two completely different rhythms, both of which are appropriate for the part, but in combination are quite disorienting. Overtop of this multiplicity of beats, the rest of the band plays a dark, tribal rhythm that fits well with the percussion overload. Lyrically, Chamberlain struggles with the fact of his mortality, and the mortality of all things. But he doesn't come from the typical Christian perspective indicated by the song's title. This is not a Revelation-inspired pre-apocalyptic rant. No, in fact, it seems to be a political song. "We will be the new ice age. We will be the new plague. Disguised as a colony, we will wipe them all away. Feast your eyes, or just rip them out... We are the cancer. We are the virus." I can imagine Gehenna singing these same lyrics, the inherent despair in their pessimistic view of the human takeover of the Earth offset only by the song's final line: "Tell me it's not too late."

"We Are The Involuntary" is one of the album's best songs musically, and in giving the album its title, also makes overt reference to reaching for something divine. This one is about religion for sure. So why do I feel such a connection with it? "Hands in the air and love at our sides, there's got to be something bigger." I may not be reaching for divinity, but I feel this same desire in my life a lot of the time. It is hard to go through day after day feeling like your actions have no purpose. It's hard to deal with your life seeming meaningless, like you're just staying alive because of the survival instinct common to all animals. I've never been someone who was satisfied with being well-fed and comfortable. I want to be putting something into the world to make it a better place. Every time I go a day without writing, without using the talents I have to give, I feel like I'm wasting the day. "Under the glass behind it all, watch us crawl so fearfully," Chamberlain sings on "We Are The Involuntary." It's true--this is much of the human condition. Struggle, failure, fear, and regret. But there is another side to what we're capable of, and "We Are The Involuntary" showcases that side as well. For the first half of the song, Chamberlain sings all of the words over heavy, pounding verses and quieter but still dark and understated choruses that are more like a bridge than a true chorus. Halfway through the song, things start to fall apart, with the guitars degenerating into feedback as the drums are left to carry on by themselves. Chamberlain is screaming over this part, but even his voice isn't enough toe keep things together, and finally everything stops. After a few seconds of unstructured feedback, Gillespie's voice, almost inaudible, counts the band back in, and they launch into a heavy breakdown over which Chamberlain screams the album's title. And then the song changes completely. The guitars begin playing an understated melody, and Aaron Gillespie begins singing the lead vocal. The "hand in the air" line quoted at the beginning of this paragraph is his first line, and it's fitting that the song's emotional tone changes completely as he starts to sing it. "I'll come up for peace, I'll come up for truth," he continues, focusing on the positive things that make life worth it. Here again, we have opposite thought processes existing simultaneously, with Chamberlain and Gillespie representing the negative and positive sides of the same issue. These songs document the separation.

"Coming Down Is Calming Down" was my favorite song on this album the first time I heard it, and it still is a year and a half later. Unlike most of the songs on Lost In The Sound Of Separation, "Coming Down Is Calming Down" would not seem out of place on the previous Underoath album, Define The Great Line. Its musical structure is more akin to those used on that album, with heavy verses contrasting, and building towards, melodic choruses. Lyrically, it also fits with Define's songs of personal struggle, stepping away from the duality explored on much of this album to have Gillespie and Chamberlain speak in one voice again, seeking solace and reassurance in dark times. Therefore, I suppose, the song that I like the best on this album is not nearly as thematically linked to the rest of it as it is to the earlier Underoath work that I always liked better anyway. That's OK, though, because "Coming Down Is Calming Down" provides a more accessible way into an album that can be a bit inaccessible at first. If there hadn't been a song like this on here, I might have been a good bit more disappointed with this album than I otherwise have been. I might not have stuck with it long enough to make the connections I've made to it tonight.

But let's talk about this song for a minute. I don't know why it is that I've always related so strongly to Underoath's lyrics about depression and anxiety, since they are generally expressed as prayers to god. My best guess is that it's easy for me to transpose the pleading tone taken in "Coming Down Is Calming Down" and other, similar songs from one addressed towards a divine figure to one addressed to friends and potential friends. A lot of times, my depression takes the form of feeling like no one is listening, no one cares, and no one understands. I'm sure the more erudite cultural critics would consider such feelings, when expressed in song, cliched and immature. But when those musical expressions ring so true, and connect so deeply, not just for me but for many other listeners, it seems uncharitable at best, callous at worst, to turn up one's nose at songs that make thousands of lonely people feel a little less alone. When Aaron Gillespie leads into the chorus of "Coming Down Is Calming Down" by singing, "I've been losing my footing here," I know what he means. All too frequently, I sing along with it not just because I like the melody but because I've been feeling the same way lately. That isn't the line that hits me the hardest, though. What really gets me is what Chamberlain screams in the second verse: "I put my words out there for you to hear, but they never made much sense to you." This is my worst fear--that all of the writing that I do will never amount to anything. This is why I don't actively solicit paid writing jobs. I don't have enough confidence in what I do to believe that I deserve to make my living from it. Everything I've ever done for anyone else has been coincidental, something I've fallen into rather than something I actively tried to achieve. I'm terrified that if I worked towards making my words a way to keep me alive, that I would fail. I don't want to be a failure at the only thing I love to do, at the only thing that's ever made me feel like a worthwhile human being whose existence was justifiable. So when I speak, I do it quietly, in a little-used corner of the internet. I try to disturb as few people as possible. I want to believe that I deserve better, but I desperately fear that even this is too much to ask for.

There is no perfect version of me, not attainable through prayer or worship or any sort of blessing that will occur after I'm dead. At least, I don't think so. But I can't stop trying to believe that there is some better version of me, that I can improve, that I have free will and the ability to conquer my fears, to transcend my current lowly, struggling state. While I'm here, the music of Underoath makes me feel better, because they admit to their own doubts and speak their own fears aloud. More important, though, is the fact that they never lose hope. Even on an album that mostly focuses on Spencer Chamberlain's desperate, panicked screams, Aaron Gillespie's clean, melodic vocals step in on occasion to offer a hopeful, positive counterpoint. When I listen to Underoath, I feel like someone understands. But I also feel like things might get better. Maybe I am separate from the best version of myself that I can be, but in the music of Underoath, I find hope that I can get there someday. This gift, given freely, has such importance for me that any disagreement over religion pales in comparison. I'm sure I'll keep listening for a long time to come.

In/Humanity and alienation.

In/Humanity were from South Carolina in the early 90s, and at that point in hardcore's history, I would imagine that it was pretty lonely being a band in that style from that part of the United States. In/Humanity weren't your average hardcore band, either; from their earliest recordings, their lyrics indicated intelligence, insight, and an unique perspective into the issues of the day. On their first LP, The Nutty Antichrist, they released such songs as "Embrace Androgyny," "Southern Swastika" (a protest against the fact that their state still flew the Confederate flag atop their statehouse [it must have been so hard to be a punk in South Carolina back then]), and "Fuck the Death Penalty, Let's Compromise" (on which they advocated allowing convicted murderers to choose whether to be executed or to spend life in prison). They also showed a cynical, prankster-ish streak, though, as other songs, like "Teenage Suicide--Do It!" and "Stupid Children" made only too clear. The album ended with the title track, on which singer Chris Bickel told an anti-Christian joke that used his own name: "Jesus knocked at the door to my heart, said, 'Chris Bickel get out here right now!' Satan answered the knock at my door, and said, 'Chris Bickel doesn't live here anymore'." The lyric sheet contained a note encouraging the listener to insert their own name into the appropriate part of the song.



While Nutty Antichrist made it clear that there were intelligent and creative minds behind In/Humanity, its music was, for the most part, pretty conventional hardcore. It was very fast, featuring borderline blastbeat drumming on some tracks, and some interesting songwriting choices (the breakdown on "Stupid Children" and the false ending on "Teenage Suicide" stand out), but compared to some of In/Humanity's peers in the chaotic hardcore scene of the time, such as Antioch Arrow or Universal Order Of Armageddon, what they were doing on The Nutty Antichrist wasn't that weird at all. That started to change on the EP they released inbetween their two LPs, Your Future Lies Smoldering At The Feet Of Robots, on which they got slower, heavier, and above all, weirder. "Modern Hate Vibe" mixed standard fastcore verses with a chorus that was simultaneously melodic and disturbing, as a chorus of off-key voices low in the mix harmonized with Chris Bickel. They warbled and shuddered as they did so, sounding like a tape that had been dropped underwater. "Burn It To The Ground" was nearly four minutes long, an unheard of length for In/Humanity, and it based itself around a foreboding bassline that turned into a full-on headbanging breakdown on the choruses. In/Humanity had never seemed like a mosh band before, and they really didn't now either--the entire EP was a frightening listen, which made me too nervous to even contemplate dancing.



All of this was just a prelude, though, to their second and, it turned out, final LP, The History Behind the Mystery. That record centered on a murder mystery, the plot of which was told over the course of the last three songs on side one. Most of the plot was enumerated in the first song, "Mystery Solved--The History Behind the Mystery." The lyrics of this song consisted of short declarative sentences that would have fit well in a children's book, but for their morbid subject matter. "Ronald got up. Ronald found James. Ronald saw that James was dead. Ronald yelled. Everyone ran to Ronald. The others saw James. Everyone talked." The lyrics go on in this fashion, telling of cops and doctors and accusations and shootouts. In "The Execution of Clive," a much more standard hardcore song than the creepy, meandering "Mystery Solved," the butler is accused of the murder, attempts to flee, and is shot to death. But the real climax of the story is in the final song, "New Discarded Evidence In The Case." "James was so lonely. James only had his health. James was so lonely. James probably killed himself."



Basing an entire record around this bizarre version of a murder mystery seems to fit In/Humanity's mindset at this point in their careers. The real point they are making with the murder mystery is a despairing one, about the pointlessness of existence, and the seeming impossibility of making a real connection with another person. They begin making this point with the record's opening track, "If It's Wrong It's Real." Later, when creating a CD discography collecting their out of print vinyl releases, they changed the order of the songs completely and did some pretty serious remixing. At that time, they added a lengthy introduction to the song; the version on the original LP doesn't contain the sample. The sample is of a Satanic priest intoning an Aleister Crowley quote, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," and then leading a congregation in repeated chants of "Hail Satan!" Despite not having been a part of the original song, it's a fitting introduction. There is Satanic imagery all over the album's art, from the box of 666 cough syrup on the cover to the pentagrams that festoon the lyric booklet, the entire album is awash in the visual paraphernalia of Satanism. The LP comes with a 33 RPM 7 inch EP, which contains four more songs, collectively titled The Anakrinomphicon Quintilogy. That EP is so bizarre that it makes the main LP seem pretty conventional (which it’s not, at all). It also contributes significantly to the album’s visual theme of Satanism. No doubt In/Humanity would have told you at the time that this was all a joke, or at least intended somewhat ironically. In the clear invocation of Anton LaVey's Church Of Satan rather than a more pagan vision of Satanism a la Black Widow, my theory is that In/Humanity are making some sort of reference to humanity's innate selfishness. And I can't tell if that's a positive or a negative thing in their eyes--on the surface, they always presented themselves as taking a negative attitude towards humanity as a whole (see "Teenage Suicide--Do It!"), but the despairing emotional undercurrents that threaten to completely overtake both the lyrics and the music on The History Behind The Mystery make me think that this "hatred of humanity" pose is just cover for deeper pain.



Pain is the entire focus of "If It's Wrong It's Real." The explanation of the song’s lyrics that is given in the album’s liner notes simply reads “Suicide note.” The song begins with mournful strings playing a two-note drone, under which drummer Will Z. and bassist Ben Roth play an understated vamp. When Chris Bickel and guitarist Paul Swanson join in, though, the song seems to change completely, even though Swanson's guitar is playing the same slow two-chord melody that had been previously played by the string section. It's been transformed into a distorted howl, though, and Bickel adds a howl of his own, screaming in rhythm with the pulses of the guitar chords in a way that makes it sound like he isn't even saying any words. He is, though, and what he's screaming is one of my favorite lyrics ever:

I once said that I'd calm down if you'd be there when I came down.

It's hard to talk about this line, because it has such an intensely personal meaning in my own life, and I don't want to force that interpretation on words written by someone else, who may have meant something completely different than what I took from it. And yet, I feel like this line (and the lyrics to this song as a whole) have had so much meaning in my own life that even if I'm totally off-base in my perception of its meaning, it has to have some validity, some importance. I will proceed with this writing as if that's true.

I've spent plenty of time in my life struggling hard with lack of self-esteem, with depression so intense I could barely get through the day, with overwhelming desires to take my own life. The line I quoted above is a remarkably brief summation of how I often feel in relation to other people in my life when I am at my worst. I know it's wrong; I know that I don't have the right to lean on others, to make them responsible for my self-worth at times when I can't be responsible for my own. I know that I can't expect people to always be there for me, and I know that I can't expect to ever get past my feelings of depression and worthlessness if I can't believe in myself enough to not need the support of other people to stay alive. And yet, when you feel that crappy and you know you're on your own, it can be easy to point the finger at others, even if it's just in your own mind. It can be particularly easy to look to former lovers, people who were supposed to be there for you in a closer, more thorough fashion than anyone else, and blame them for your current emotional state. "You said you would be there for me, and you lied," you might find yourself thinking. "You were supposed to keep me from getting to this point, and you abandoned me." I have played out such imaginary conversations with exes in my head, knowing all along that the thoughts I was directing at them were invalid, that I had no right to expect such things of them. And yet, when you're at your worst, it can sometimes feel better to point the blame at others instead of admitting that it truly lies with yourself. (This problem is one of the things I started therapy in order to deal with. I'm happy to report that it has been working so far.)



When I feel this way, I know it's wrong. Chris Bickel does too. As the song progresses, it moves from the brutal, distortion-driven version of the string section's slow, mournful mantra into a faster, more conventional hardcore riff. That riff still sounds dark and ominous, due to the droning feedback and reverberating strings that still hover, deep down in the mix, throughout even the most energetic parts of the song. But it is fast, angry hardcore, even if Bickel has turned that anger inward. "All bliss is gone," he screams. "All love I kill." When feeling abandoned by someone who was supposed to love you, it's tough to face the fact that your own neuroses were often what drove them away. And yet, that fact can be impossible to escape. If you killed the love in the other person's heart, you might not want to admit that, but you know you did it. You always know. "All love I kill, and this is wrong," Bickel screams, further excoriating himself. "But if it's wrong, I know it's real," he finally declares, revealing the sentiment behind the song's title. Doing the wrong thing is often all that a depressed person understands. They (I) get comfortable with loneliness, fear of judgement, feelings of being outcast by society, and they stop knowing how to deal with the alternatives. Feeling wrong, feeling bad, is comforting, because it's what we're used to. If it's wrong, I know it's real.



The second side of The History Behind The Mystery only further emphasizes the mood created on the first side. "Too Drunk To Molotov" is a harsh attack on punk rock's ostensible status as a revolutionary counterculture. "We will fight them in the streets," the song begins, stealing the title of Minneapolis crust band Code 13's second EP to launch a criticism of the sorts of kids who had that EP in their collection. "Punk rock's nothing more than a Halloween costume contest to you," screams Bickel. "You're more concerned with the contents of that 40 bottle than the actual bottle's uses as an implement of state smashing destruction." One can imagine the sorts of punks that this song is about not being able to decipher what Bickel means with this complex statement, which again seems to be his entire point. The song's final line is screamed over a breakdown on which Paul Swanson plays zooming, descending chords that make it sound like his guitar is sick. "Too drunk to fuck shit up!" Bickel screams over Swanson's woozy guitar accompaniment, which manages to do a perfect sonic imitation of some kids in a spiked jean jacket staggering around with a 40 bottle in his hand.

On "No Thanks Mr. Roboto," Bickel references Styx to protest against his feelings of dehumanization. "I'm now a robot more than a man," he claims. "Lost my emotions to parts from Japan." The entire song makes references to lines from Styx's song "Mr. Roboto," and anyone familiar with that tune will be able to pick out those references easily. However, to hover over the lyric sheet trainspotting Styx lyrics misses the song's point. Again, that point is buried in the final line of the song, where it is easy to miss its importance. "You're in the ground and have been there for weeks," Bickel screams. "And now I can't hide the rust on my cheeks." Is this song really about someone attempting to deal with death through denial of their emotions? Well, it could be about a lot of other things too, and it probably is. But the final lines make a lie of all of the previous claims to no longer have emotions, and therefore kind of invalidate all of Bickel's previous protests of feeling dehumanized. Maybe it's more something he wants than something he's actually experiencing. Maybe his emotions are too hard to deal with, and he's trying to wish them away. I've wanted that many times in my life, and like Bickel, no matter how hard I wished, it never worked.



The History Behind The Mystery's clearest statement of alienation, of loneliness and inability to connect with others, is far less metaphorical and more literal than any other song on the album. It is the penultimate track on the album, and it's called "We're Sick Of Music And We Hate Each Other." As an expression of the way being in a band with someone can cause frustration, resentment, and eventually outright hatred for them to breed within you, it is far too accurate to have been intended seriously. "Thought you were a brother, thought you were a friend," Bickel begins. "But you told me something that I didn't like. What you said about me... was it out of spite?" In these two lines, which come near the beginning of the song, Bickel hits directly upon the problems that specifically afflict relationships involving people who struggle with depression. On one hand, there is the inability to take criticism. On the other hand, there is the constant fear of judgement, of secret hatred that is never revealed, of people laughing at you behind your back. Bickel might know that he's wrong to hold a disagreement with a friend against that friend on a permanent basis. He might equally know that his fear of being judged is paranoia that he shouldn't seriously dignify. And yet, those feelings remain. They grow, and they fester. Until: "Now I think you're a fucking jerk. You fucking fucking fucking jerk." This is where the song gets a bit silly. "Fuck you, Chris Bickel, fuck you, Paul Swanson, fuck you, Will Z., fuck you, Ben Roth," Bickel screams, finally dissolving into a frantically repeated chorus of "Fuck you"'s--16 in all. The fact that he names himself, and in doing so gives equal weight to the frustrations of his bandmates with him as he gives to his own frustrations with them makes the song seem less from Bickel's viewpoint than an ironic view of the tensions that exist within bands after they've been together for a long time. At the time, I took it as a joke. How could they have written a song as self-aware as this and still have been serious? And yet, In/Humanity only survived long enough to record one more EP--the truly bizarre Occultonomy. And even on that EP, Bickel and Swanson had replaced the band's rhythm section, bringing in two new members for a final incarnation of the band that still wasn't able to stay together for more than a few months. "We're Sick Of Music And We Hate Each Other" may have been intended as a joke, but it almost certainly also expressed some real, if buried, emotions.

In/Humanity - "If It's Wrong It's Real," "Teenage Suicide--Do It!," "The Nutty Antichrist," "We're Sick Of Music And We Hate Each Other"

Brave men run away from me.

Sonic Youth have been around for a very long time now, and the critical discussion around them as an important influence on the modern alternative rock world has coalesced around a few of the most influential moments in their career. Daydream Nation, of course, and Dirty, Murray Street maybe, definitely "The Diamond Sea." The unfortunate corollary to this fact is that huge swaths of their career are rarely discussed anymore. Amongst my friends, I notice that even the diehard fans only have a few of their records. And maybe it's my completist streak that's unhealthy and not their ability to get by with only three records by their favorite band, but either way it makes it hard for me to have quality discussions of the Sonic Youth album that has stuck with me the most over the last few years. No one I know has ever heard Bad Moon Rising.



But I want to talk about Bad Moon Rising here now, because I'm going through yet another one of my phases in which I play it every day, sometimes multiple times a day, and the more I play it, the deeper it pulls me in. There's so much in this record, I almost don't even see it as just a record anymore. It's like a 3D movie if 3D actually did what it's supposed to do: put you right in the middle of the movie, like it's not happening in front of you but all around you. That's how Bad Moon Rising makes me feel. I put it on and sink into a huge, surrounding atmosphere. Bad Moon Rising is structured like one continuous fever-dream reverie, a huge floating universe in the space between chords, a swirling vortex of alienation and horror and glorious transcendence, sending the listener flying through disparate emotions in close proximity, sometimes delivering all of them at the same time and leaving you to sort out how you actually feel. The band intended it to be an American travelogue of sorts, taking the name from Creedence Clearwater Revival's 1969 slice of hoodoo rock n' roll Americana and inspiration for the album's most famous song from the Charles Manson murders that the Creedence song seemed to predict. Anything you read about this record will tell you in detail about its attempt to reflect the dark side of middle American culture.

The reason Bad Moon Rising has stuck with me for so long, though, is not so much because of the resonance of its intended subject matter as because I have found a more personal meaning in its collection of songs, one that might not be borne out by the intended subject matter but is present in the music regardless. There are plenty of records out there designed for the listener who is questioning their place in the universe. Bad Moon Rising is not that. Bad Moon Rising comes from a place where the realization that there is no place where you will fit in has long since passed.

I'm writing this post on Valentine's Day, which I will spend alone, as I have for years. Valentine's Day ends a season that I sometimes think of as "the suicide holidays," and though I have obviously not yet killed myself I imagine that if I'm ever to do so it will happen sometime during this part of the year. When it's cold outside I already have trouble with depression, as the cold makes me want to stay in the house, and staying in the house makes me feel more alienated than I already do on a day to day basis. But then there's Christmas, and really the entire period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the huge consumer-culture push that focuses on familial connections in order to inspire cash outlays. I was working in a mall for that period of this year, so I couldn't escape it. I worked at a kiosk outside a jewelry store and a lingerie store, which collaborated to remind me daily that there was no romantic love in my life. I spent as little time at my parents' house over the actual Christmas holiday as I could, but I really can't be around my family at all without constant forcible reminders of our dysfunction, our inability to relate to each other. And then there was New Year's Eve, a time for drinking and celebrating the end of a year, which always seems so perverse to me. The end of a year just reminds me of all of the goals I set for myself and didn't meet. And then my birthday comes towards the end of January to reinforce that reminder all over again. Another year older, and what do I have to show for it? Time to accomplish things grows ever shorter. Finally, there's Valentine's Day, which reminds me once again that there is no romantic love in my life, this time twisting the knife a little bit with all of the visions of happy couples I must endure. I guess the fact that I'm writing this means I ran the gauntlet for another year, which is a worthy accomplishment, but makes me feel no less alienated from the world around me.



Bad Moon Rising begins with "Brave Men Run," and although that song is preceded by a short "Intro" that is labeled as a separate track, it's really just the beginning of that song. "Brave Men Run" begins with layered guitars playing interlocking chiming melodies, and when the drums and bass come in after a short pause, the entire band plays a midtempo riff that spirals upward gloriously, sounding like the basis for a gorgeous heavy-guitar pop song. However, just at the climactic moment, Thurston Moore loses the melodic thread completely, beginning to saw at his guitar strings wildly and causing the entire riff to derail. It plunges downward into an ambient bridge, and as Thurston and Lee Ranaldo pick out occasional disconnected melody lines, the bass and drums carry the song out into what feels like open space, aurally speaking, removing any riff-centric basis for the song and leaving a wide ambient area for Kim Gordon to deliver her vocals. It's only when this point is reached that she begins singing, and while the words escalate, bringing the song to a climactic point in which Kim howls its title, then expounds on the phrase: "...in my family, ...into the setting sun, ...into captivity..." Thurston and Lee are still playing their guitars behind her, but what they're playing has nothing to do with rhythm or melody or riff or anything--it's all just disconnected notes, accents as textures, with the bass and drums still carrying the rhythm of the song as they have throughout the vocal section. Finally, even the drums stop, and as Kim continues to play the first few notes of the bass riff, she whispers, "Brave men run away from me."

The entire song fades out here, but not into silence; instead, it disappears into a tape loop of the locked groove that ends side four of Lou Reed's guitar feedback symphony, Metal Machine Music. An album seen by many as directionless noise, I've always found Metal Machine Music to be beautiful, and I know I've come upon a kindred spirit when I run into someone who agrees. It makes me think that Thurston Moore and I would have some things to talk about if we ever met (which we never will). The origin of the Metal Machine Music tape loop's appearance on Bad Moon Rising was an onstage dilemma faced by Sonic Youth in their early days of being too poor to buy multiple guitars. They used different tunings for every song, and needed things to keep their live audiences occupied (and drown out hecklers) during the lengthy tuning breaks between songs. The tape loops ended up on the album, and indeed, "Society Is A Hole" seems to take its rhythmic basis more from the oscillating Lou Reed guitar feedback than from anything the band is actually playing. Because of that, the song starts before "Brave Men Run" really ends, and everything played by an actual member of the band during the song seems more like an accent added onto that basic foundation of looping noise.

"Society is a hole," Thurston sings, making his own alienation into a pun that works precisely because no attention is ever called to it. Bad Moon Rising doesn't always provide lyrical backing for my repurposing it as the soundtrack to my alienation, but on this song, it does so in spades. That said, I can't do much rational explication for lines like "You got big big hair and everybody's scared," or "My friends are girls wrapped in boys." You either know what those things mean or you don't, I'd say. Thurston intones all of these lines in a mournful monotone, sounding almost like the old hillbilly singers of the early 20th century, only without even a semblance of melody to guide his voice. It's as if a nightmare version of the Singing Brakeman Jimmie Rodgers only had the clanging rattle of the train's wheels to sing with, and had to stay with the same note all the time or risk going off-key. When Thurston isn't singing, the tape loop underneath Bob Bert's tapping cymbals and Kim Gordon's three-note bassline slides into the front of the mix, going against the grain of the song's actual tempo with its repetitive one-two rumbles and hums, sounding like train wheels clacking over tracks in super-slow motion.



The song ends when this tape loop is submerged under a horrible recording of "Not Right" by the Stooges, taped from a record player that seems to skip at least every third revolution, and making a three-minute song go by in less than a minute. As I said, it sounds horrible; the strums of the guitar distort into chopping scratches, and the beat is entirely inaudible. For young fans in the mid-80s who'd never heard the Stooges, it must have been impossible to figure out what this even was. But then, you could say that about the entire album.

The totally fucked incidental-music version of "Not Right" soon fades into a sound that I first thought were church bells. It soon becomes clear, though, that these are the dulcet strains of "I Love Her All The Time," its guitar riffs all consisting of shaking, rattling guitar strings and scraping atonal sounds. I don't know that this song is played entirely by beating on guitars with drumsticks and shaking them in front of amps that are feeding back, but if there are any actual strummed, chorded guitar parts, I don't hear them. Instead, there is Kim Gordon's two-note bassline, that moves from a note identical to the ones the guitars are spitting through feedback to a lower note that sounds sick, as if its ever-so-slightly out of key. It may be, since Kim Gordon has always played her bass in standard tuning, no matter what kind of weird tunings Thurston and Lee come up with for their parts of any given song. This note might be the closest she can get to an on-key note. It works for the song, though, as it is but one of several elements that make "I Love Her All The Time," however sincerely it was written (and I assume it was a sincere love song from Thurston to Kim, as the two of them got married around the time it was recorded), seem like a fucked-up parody of a love song. As ambiently constructed as "Society Is A Hole," "I Love Her All The Time" has even less of a foundation to build on, lacking even a tape loop to pull the whole thing together. The guitars ring like bells, scrape like wrecked cars on cement barriers, groan like dying dogs, but never create any sort of melody. Thurston's vocal doesn't pick up that slack, either. He's at least gasping in two different notes on this song--notes which, by the way, oppose rather than harmonize with the two notes Kim is playing on bass--but there's still more atonality to his singing than anything. Then halfway through the song, the whole thing implodes like a punch to the gut. Kim starts playing much lower notes, Thurston and Lee go into full-on feedback mode, and Bob Bert pounds his floor toms with abandon. If you're playing the record loud (and I always am), it feels like your entire apartment is shaking, like your speakers will drop through the floor into your downstairs neighbor's place if the pounding doesn't stop soon. It does stop--too soon, in fact, because if I'm listening to this record I'm probably praying for destruction--but that gut-churning middle section gives the lie to any conception of "I Love Her All The Time" as nothing more than a sincere love song. As does the end of the song, for that matter, as the drums during the final verse become nothing more than random crashes on a cymbal here or there before stopping completely, along with the bassline and any semblance of song form, at the end of that verse. There's still at least another minute of the song left, though, and it's all just sick, bent, grinding feedback. The guitars don't sound like they're in love; they sound nauseated.

Side two begins with "Ghost Bitch," which, like "Society Is A Hole," constructs its rhythm around noises that remind me of a train. Sonic Youth are the sort of band to sample the sounds of a train, and in fact did so on their next album, Evol, forming half of the song "Secret Girl" around a recording of a train going down a track. "Ghost Bitch" doesn't have clickety-clack noises, though--instead, a repetitive feedback howl that occurs at the top of every measure for the first half of the song sounds exactly like the horn of a train bearing down on a car that has stalled out on railroad tracks. It repeats for several minutes, but it's impossible to get used to. It sounds frightening. When I'm playing this album loud (and I always am), I feel like I need to move out of the way of something. But then, I react to a lot of stimuli in that way. I jump at shadows and irrationally fear strangers and dark places I haven't been in before. "Ghost Bitch" functions like a horror movie for me, allowing me to work through my issues with fear in a safe environment where I know I'm not really in any danger. It's not the only song on Bad Moon Rising that has this function for me. I play it louder and louder, just like I watch scarier and scarier horror movies, always pushing my limits, seeing how much I can stand before I have to stop. And then I'll try again later.

"Ghost Bitch" isn't really scary until halfway through, though. The train-coming noises are tough, as are Kim's muttered lyrics, in which she spools out ominous imagery: "Locking arms side by side, crouch down before the fire's light." But then, after the first verse, the song finally kicks all the way in, with Bob pounding on his toms and Kim yelling: "I still remember their savage cries... faces painted in joyous fright!" Thurston and Lee increase the intensity of their feedback, no longer stopping and starting the train noise but carrying it on constantly in the right speaker as the other guitar scrapes and screeches in the left. Under it all, Kim's bass rumbles, playing no intelligible notes but instead a dark bed of sound that deepens the horrific feel the song creates. "You're the first day of my life!" she screams at the end of the verse, and everything cuts out except feedback, which spirals upwards and seems like an ending until Bob Bert, who'd leave the band after this album to play a drumkit consisting mostly of pieces of metal in Pussy Galore, pounds on a piece of sheet metal and a floor tom and is echoed by strikes against guitar strings that reverberate with the metal sounds so completely that it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. This outburst also trails off into spiraling feedback, which is chopped off without warning in favor of pounding toms and a background loop of church bells.



Thus begins "I'm Insane," a roundabout personal manifesto driven by repetition. Drums thud, guitars saw on staccato chords, the bassline mostly consists of one note repeated over and over (sometimes replaced by a higher octave of the same note). Atop it all, Thurston recites a poetic lyric consisting of foreboding, disconnected images. Beneath it all, the church bells, ringing at the edge of hearing, usually inaudible but always texturally present. "A steaming swamp. A troubled heart. The sky is red. I can't stop running." Thurston's lyric has a narrative quality to it, but doesn't go anyplace that you could plot out on a map. Instead, it escalates along with the music, carrying its repetition toward a climax that never quite arrives, building up and then building down, all without ever really changing. "I'm Insane" distinguishes itself from the majority of Bad Moon Rising by creating the same sort of hovering, spacious feel that is common to most of the album, but without leaving much of any space between its instruments. The mix for this song is thick, but the repetition of the song's construction opens up a different space inside the head of the listener, seeming to go on forever even as it ends after only four minutes.

If "I'm Insane" goes on forever, "Justice Is Might" never seems to start. Flowing naturally from what remains when most of the instruments in "I'm Insane" have trailed off to a stop, "Justice Is Might" builds up around a loop of feedback that works the same as the Metal Machine Music loop worked in "Society Is A Hole," although I'm pretty sure it's a loop created by Sonic Youth themselves, not one cribbed from another record. Over that loop, Thurston, speaking through distortion effects, announces the song as if he's a hardcore frontman explaining the political content of the song the band is about to play. As a veteran of the hardcore scene, I know all about these introductions, which sometimes stretch on a good bit longer than the actual songs they introduce. And sometimes they're incoherent, too, though never quite as incoherent as Thurston's translated introduction is revealed to be. "This song is called 'Justice Is Might,' it's about sonic life," he stammers out, before going on to explain that "you have a genius and a sex maniac living together taking lots of drugs and fucking all day, and it's just like... staying at home and risking your life." This introduction is the first two minutes of this four-minute track, and what follows it might just be Sonic Youth's version of a one-minute hardcore song. As Bob plays a rumbling beat on his toms, Lee and Thurston chop out what might be a two-chord riff if it originated in an insane asylum on Venus. "I know it's wrong, but that is all right," Thurston declaims. "As long as it's strong, it's just that it might." He repeats the song's title twice, and then it's over. But not really, as now we get another minute and a half of trailing feedback over which he continues to repeat the song's title through the same distortion he used to introduce it. "Justice Is Might" feels like the auditory version of watching a hardcore show through the eyes of Pablo Picasso. This is the reflection of a very unique, some might say twisted, perspective, applied to the hardcore scene. And yet it comes from Thurston Moore, who did time in the NY hardcore band Even Worse before forming Sonic Youth and has played guitar in recent reunions of Negative Approach, the member of the band who most appreciated what hardcore had to offer on its own terms, as a musical form and a culture. And yet, how can it seem weird to me, a fellow hardcore veteran who finds the whole thing both brilliant and absurd, inviting and alienating? I understand exactly what he means. In fact, the song's title is most easily understood to mean "might makes right," but because I was looking for puns and double-meanings after seeing the title "Society Is A Hole" on Bad Moon Rising's back cover, I read the word might as synonymous with "may be" for years. It seems like Thurston might intend this too, as the lyric "It's just that it might" recasts the word in the same meaning, and also thereby influences the reading of the title. Maybe it's all a reference to the way the hardcore scene carries itself as if it knows all the answers to all of society's problems, but never is able to solve the problems that exist within it.



The conclusion of this album is its climactic moment, and "Death Valley 69" stands apart from almost everything that has come before, as it forsakes the floating atmosphere of the rest of Bad Moon Rising in favor of a simple, pounding riff that separates itself from hardcore or metal only by the stop-start cadence with which Sonic Youth plays it. Instead of flowing out of the song that has come before, "Death Valley 69" follows the only stretch of silence on the whole album (other than the side division), Bob Bert kicking things off with a stick-clicking four count and the whole band slamming into the riff like they're trying to kill their guitars. "Death Valley 69"'s riff-based construction is the mirror image of the album's beginning, "Brave Men Run" opening with a solid riff just as pretty and upbeat as "Death Valley 69" is ugly and dark. The entire band works together to pound the already memorable two-chord riff into your brain so deeply that it can never be dislodged. While they do so, Thurston sings the song's frightening lyrics from the point of view of Charles Manson. "Coming down," he yells. "Sadie, I love it." The verse is followed by a careening instrumental chorus, and then even "Death Valley 69" has an ambient breakdown, on which Thurston and Lee's guitars step into the background, ringing and shaking as Kim Gordon's bass and Bob Bert's rolling toms swirl around your head, creating an atmosphere that goes beyond foreboding into full-on terror. Meanwhile, Thurston as Charlie Manson is joined by guest vocalist Lydia Lunch in the role of Manson killer Sadie Mae Glutz. They sing almost in unison, constructing a dual narrative that is constructed in a creative manner; at one point, Thurston sings "I got sand in my mouth" as Lydia sings "You got sand in your mouth." Then on the next line, Thurston sings, "You got sun in your eyes" as Lydia sings "I got sun in my eyes." But any discussion of this kind of thing avoids the song's dark heart--a matter-of-fact description of a murder committed by both Charlie and Sadie. Lydia Lunch sounds like she's taking an almost sexual pleasure in the act, while Thurston perfectly captures the vicious joy of an unrepentant killer. By the end of this long, creepy interlude, when Thurston says, "She started to holler, so I had to hit it," and Lydia is goading him on, screaming "Hit it!" over and over, the frantic terror is almost too much to bear. Just before everyone freaks out and turns the record off, the band slams back into the song's main riff, but this is not salvation, as the song's final verse is even more frightening, as Thurston repeats the song title over and over while Lydia screams incoherently. There's more fright packed into this five-minute avalanche of a song than most horror movies put into two hours. And this was the album's single! I first heard it on the radio, in fact. The college station played it in the middle of the night when I was 14 years old. It kept me awake for hours.

But really, what better way to end an album constructed entirely around alienation and existential horror than with some actual terror? "Death Valley 69" merely gives voice to sentiments that are implied but not spoken in all of the other songs on Bad Moon Rising. I'm not saying I relate to songs written from the point of view of a serial killer--in fact, it's just the opposite. I think what Sonic Youth reveal in "Death Valley 69" is the underlying fear of all alienated souls--that this world will be too much for them. That feeling like there's nowhere that you belong is something you can only deal with for so long before giving up entirely. And what happens when you give up? Do you attack society as a (w)hole through violent, antisocial acts? Or do you let the suicide holidays win? It's not a question to which there is one permanent answer. You can only answer it in terms of the day, maybe even the hour, that you are living through. And hope that the answer you come up with does indeed involve you living through it.

Finally got to see Gehenna.

Last week I attended what has become an annual event in the Baltimore hardcore scene: Dom of Pulling Teeth's birthday show. The highlight for me this year was an actual performance by the elusive and infamous West Coast hardcore band Gehenna. Two years ago, they were also scheduled to perform, so I drove up for that show too. Gehenna cancelled, as was their wont at the time, but Starkweather did play, and absolutely blew me away, so I was glad I attended. This year, I figured Gehenna would cancel again, but I was happy enough about seeing Integrity and Ringworm, so I didn't feel too bad about the fact that once again, I'd go to a show that one of my all-time favorite bands was scheduled to play, and not actually get to see them.

But then, surprise surprise, Gehenna did show up. Dom posted on the internet two days before the show that he had picked them up from the airport, that they would definitely play. I was excited, but also nervous. Gehenna have a reputation for onstage antics that goes beyond just "being brutal" or whatever. As my friend Brandon has pointed out, they're almost an urban legend of a band. Everyone in the hardcore scene who has heard of them at all has heard the stories about singer Mike Cheese attacking audience members and laying waste to venues, even supposedly stabbing someone midset, a story of which I've heard so many different versions that at this point I don't believe any of them. Mike Cheese has fueled the fire where this sort of talk is concerned for many years himself, giving interviews in which he said intense, provocative things about both his philosophy and his behavior, things like this:
Q: When you hear about people in bands like Nirvana, Pennywise, etc. dying from overdoses, what’s your reaction?
A: I hope our band ends up like that. I couldn’t give a flyin’ fuck. Suicide is the only answer anyways. Just do it. Kill everybody.



The above is the only available Gehenna live footage from their prime days as a popular hardcore band. Nothing truly terrifying happens here, but as you can see, they were an exciting and violent live act. It may just have been performances like these combined with inflated rumors that created their mystique, or it may be that some of the stories really are true--I can't comment with any authority at all. But I can tell you that the potential for live terror and violence seems to be the main reason a lot of people want to see a Gehenna show these days. There was a show in California a few years ago that attained a level of infamy, where Gehenna showed up to the venue with only two members after the rest of the band had quit on them the night before. The two members set up a bass amp onstage for their set, played a hip hop song through it, and sat eating a burrito and smoking a blunt while the song played. That was their set. [Description paraphrased from this message board thread, which also includes Nate Newton of Converge telling a few entertaining Mike Cheese stories. Worth a read.]

While we were driving up to Baltimore, my friend Brandon mentioned the burrito set, and I started talking about how disappointed I'd be if that sort of thing happened when they played Baltimore. I've loved their music for over a decade, and I really wanted to see them play some of my favorite songs. A few years ago, I tried to capture some of my feelings about Gehenna, their music and their mystique in a piece of writing that I scribbled into a notebook and forgot about for a while. When I found the notebook in fall of 2008, I transcribed the piece exactly as I'd written it and posted it to tumblr. It was one of the first things I ever posted on that site, long before I started using it regularly. Here's some of what I wrote at the time:

Gehenna embodied the dark, anti-social worldview that was the eternal starting point for CrimethInc’s quest for romance. Even when they had just started and were still more like a straight edge moshcore band than anything else, their songs didn’t focus on anything so mundane as straight edge or beefs between ex-friends, like most bands of that stripe. Instead, they took the deep-ecology principles of hardline as a jumping-off point for condemnation of the entire human race, condemning all civilizational development as shit and hurling contempt at all responsible (including, presumably, themselves). By their third EP, their music had sped up to a frenetic tempo that made youth-crew seem slow but was still just this side of the inhuman speeds of power violence—-which allowed them to retain an essential human quality to their sound, even as Mike Cheese’s lyrics were moving further all the time into paranoid, Lovecraftian flights of fancy. Cheese’s guttural vocals were closer to the sounds one would expect to emanate from the throat of a monster than from anything human, and this fit well with his outsider’s perspective which seemed to regard itself as separate, in some respects below, and yet eternally more intelligent than the human masses that surrounded it. In songs like “Birth of Vengeance”, “Covet Thy Crown” and “Crush Opposition”, this outsider gave every indication of being prepared for and on the verge of launching an assault on civilization as a whole—-an assualt civilization seemingly hadn’t a prayer of withstanding.

This defiant stance of disdainful outsider fit perfectly with CrimethInc’s constant romanticization of struggle for food, shelter and, seemingly most importantly, freedom from mainstream society’s arbitrary restrictions. Truthfully, I couldn’t relate to Inside Front’s endless references to poverty and homelessness any more than I could relate to Gehenna’s hazy images of mythological zombie armies. And to be really truthful, it’s always seemed to me that a fair amount of gilding the lily must have gone into those stories in Inside Front—-after all, the thick newsprint magazine in which I read them came out on a regular basis for years. But there were emotions underlying all of this fiction, emotions that I understood and related to, that seemed true even if their circumstances did not: alienation and depression.

Before Gehenna played, I prepared myself. I took off my jacket and tied it around my waist. I took the lens cap off my camera and put it in my pocket. I didn't want to give myself anything that I could potentially lose once the band started playing. Of course, there was always the risk that my camera would get broken, but I was willing to take that chance in order to get pictures. There were hanging PA speakers on either side of the stage, about six feet off the floor, and I chose to stand underneath the ones on the left side of the stage. I didn't want to be out in the middle of the floor, because I figured that the violent dancing that was bound to occur would be happening out there. I didn't want any part of that. I also didn't want Mike Cheese to attack me. I figured I was minimizing my chances of that happening by standing off to the side. Yeah, I know, I'm a wimp. Fuck it, I've never pretended otherwise.

Most of the pictures I got didn't turn out too great. My camera is new to me--my dad gave it to me a few months ago--and I'd never used it to take pictures at a show before that night. Obviously I still have a lot to learn about its proper use. The picture above, the one that actually looks good, was taken from this brooklynvegan.com post. The rest of the pics on this page are my own efforts, for better or for worse.

When Gehenna hit the stage, Mike Cheese immediately started yelling about how he wasn't going to play until someone brought him some dope. He kept yelling about this between songs (and sometimes during songs) throughout the set. The band did go ahead and play, so it's tough to know how serious he was about this demand. I'll get more into that aspect later. Anyway, they opened with "83%," the first song on their first record, which is very heavy and moshy. Considering how far their sound has gotten from that style in the past decade or so, I was surprised to see them play this song, but it's one of my favorites by them, so it was a pleasant surprise. Mike Cheese jumped off stage and ran around in the front to get the crowd moving, but aside from a bunch of the sort of dudes who live to mosh at shows and don't care if they get hurt, most people just got out of the way. I think everyone was a little afraid of Mike Cheese. Within 30 seconds of the set's beginning, he'd shoved a well-known Baltimore area show videographer off the stage, and halfway through the first song, he did a really brutal stagedive onto about a dozen people standing immediately to my right. In fact, I saw him coming and took a step to the left, which is probably the only thing that kept me from being taken out as well.



Cheese was not the blur of constant motion that some stories about him had led me to expect, but that may speak more to his having gotten older and become a less frequent stage performer as it does to potential hyperbole in those stories. He'd have sudden outbursts, but most of the time, he stood still onstage and sang. That doesn't mean he was any less intense as a performer, though. The look in his eyes was terrifying. Despite the fact that he might have been standing still at any given moment, he always looked like he might be one second away from attacking you. As I write this it seems kind of ridiculous to say, but at the time, I was afraid to meet his eye. Whenever he'd look in my direction from the stage, I'd slide underneath the PA speakers so as to keep myself out of his line of sight. It felt like looking him in the eye might be interpreted as a challenge, and I didn't want to see how I'd fare in the event of such a thing.



A few songs into the set, during one of his rants about the fact that no one had brought him any dope, he charged off the stage into a backstage area that was on the other side of a curtain from where I was standing. I could hear commotion going on back there, but by the time I peeked around the curtain to see what was going on, it was impossible to see anything besides a scatter of equipment cases and a bunch of security people. Cheese ended up back onstage after a couple of minutes and the show continued--which makes it sound as if the band had stopped while he was offstage, which they didn't. They played an excellent set that lasted about 20 to 25 minutes and included quite a few songs that I knew--"Swarm/Deadshell," "Win By Attrition," "To Lay To Waste"--as well as some new material that I remember being faster than anything I'd heard them play before. Some mention has been made on Mike Cheese's blog recently of an upcoming 10 inch entitled "This World Is A Shithole," so perhaps these songs are material that will eventually materialize on that record. Or maybe it won't show up until years from now and will contain completely different songs; it's tough to tell with these guys.

Where the band was concerned, I'm pretty sure that the guitarist was the same guy who played guitar for them in the video I posted above of them playing "Swarm/Deadshell" back in the day. I can't be sure, though. I was expecting Mike Rhodes, longtime bassist, to still be in the band, but the bass player and drummer were both young longhaired guys who didn't seem like they'd been in the band very long, so hey, maybe not. I was particularly impressed with the drummer, who had a fast and ferocious style that stood out as being far better than the drumming on the most recent Gehenna records, Upon The Gravehill and the Lands Of Sodom EP. I hope they are able to keep this drummer around for a while, as he is definitely an upgrade.



The set ended with "First Blood," the opening track from their second LP, and my personal favorite of their releases, Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris. I had been headbanging and dancing around a little bit at some points during the set, but I freaked out a little bit during this song and sang along to most of the words at the top of my lungs. I was surprised I even remembered as many of them as I did. It's obviously been a long time since I was singing regularly in a hardcore band, because my throat was blown out completely after singing along to one two-minute song, and it's been sore off and on ever since. In fact, I may have given myself a cold. Pathetic, I know.

After the set, Brandon and I talked about our different perspectives on it. He'd stood in the back and watched from a safe distance. He made a comment that I thought had some truth to it, that Mike Cheese has built up such a reputation as an insane live performer that some of the stuff he does now is intended more to scare and impress people than to actually hurt them. From where Brandon was standing, he'd had a good vantage point to watch Cheese throw a chair and a mic stand into the crowd at different points (neither of which I'd been able to see from where I was standing). He said he was pretty sure Cheese wasn't actually aiming for anyone. Of course, we also talked about the fact that, for a bunch of guys from California, it'd probably be massively inconvenient to get arrested in Baltimore, and therefore maybe he'd toned things down a little bit. I couldn't help but bring up how intense and scary the guy had seemed onstage, though, and the intimidating look in his eye. In the end, it's at least my opinion that it's a little of both--Cheese is probably kidding or playing things up at times, as with the constant between-song screams of "Where's the fucking dope?" which seemed at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. For the most part, though, I really do think the dude is crazy and just doesn't give a fuck what happens. I love the music that he and his band produce, and it's a direct result of that mentality. To some extent, I even enjoyed being frightened and intimidated by his live performance. I don't think I could ever live the way he does, though.


["83%," 1/10/10, filmed by an audience member]

One thing I forgot to mention: I did actually meet Mike Cheese earlier that night. He was selling Gehenna's merchandise himself, and he had a big display of their "Die High" series of t-shirts (click the image for a much bigger version of the pic):



I bought the Ol' Dirty Bastard shirt, which features a GG Allin quote on the back: "Live fast. Die." I'm not a fan of GG's music, but I did think that was the best of the three quote possibilities, and ODB is definitely my favorite of the three guys pictured on the front (though I also like Belushi a lot). Mike Cheese was very calm and friendly when I talked to him, and struck me as a nice guy. I figure he's less like GG Allin than people sometimes imply, and more like that dude you know from around who is really cool and into a lot of the same awesome things you like, but parties way harder than you and will get you in trouble if you try to keep up with him. After I bought the shirt from him, he told me to "stay high," and I figured it'd be better to just not bring up the fact that I'm straight edge. He reminds me a lot of a guy I used to know, who moved out to the West Coast several years ago. He sang in a band called PCP Roadblock (you can get an idea of what they were about by watching this video). He was a really nice guy, and we got along really well, but when he was partying, I stayed the hell out of the way.

For more information about Gehenna, read these interviews, which are reprinted on their Myspace:

Vomitose interview
Noise Mag interview (in English and French)

Some Gehenna interviews out there are pretty worthless but these are both interesting and informative.

And of course, you can check out studio versions of their music at their Myspace page.

2009: The Year In Review (Part One).

OK, I'll admit it: I've been neglecting this blog for quite a while. There are a number of reasons for that, one being the amount of writing I'm doing on Tumblr, where I have both a personal page and themed blog called Nuggets Of The Future (which had its genesis in a post a few months ago on this blog. You'll have to follow me there if you want to see frequently-updated posts, but no worries--I'm still going to post here.

This post, in particular, will kick off a series that will probably last all month, in which I write (relatively) short reviews of every new album I heard in the year 2009. I like the idea of doing this a lot better than the making of "top however-many albums" lists at the end of every year. Those lists get tough to make, because other than the first 5 or so, it can be tough to say which albums you really think do or don't deserve to be on them. I always have a lot more records I like in any given year than I have slots on a list to fill, and in hindsight, the choices of which albums to include at #13 or #17 always seems so arbitrary. In order to replace that arbitrary feeling with something much easier to understand and learn from, I present the following reviews (as well as the ones that will fill the 4 or 5 related posts to follow):

The Entrance Band - The Entrance Band

2006's Prayer Of Death, released under Guy Blakeslee's former solo-project moniker Entrance, was the Entrance Band's actual debut LP, and it was a glorious clusterfuck of chaotic boogie riffs and atonal violin sawing, the sort of thing that would appeal to fans of the first Velvet Underground LP (and without forcing them to sit through any Nico vocals). That album was obviously transitional in nature, though, so the fact that The Entrance Band is a much more organized, better produced, conventional blues-rock album isn't all that surprising. It is somewhat disappointing, though, and that disappointment is crystallized by a new, cleaned-up version of Prayer Of Death's opening track, "Grim Reaper Blues." Where the old version sounded like something broadcast from another planet, this new version sounds almost conventional, as if with only minor tweaks (none of which would need to affect the production), it could show up on classic rock radio tomorrow. And the thing is--it's still the most interesting song on the record. The problems with the production on that song are at least somewhat offset by the song's fascinating construction and awesomely bizarre riffing. Without that riffing, though, the remaining elements that made Prayer For Death so interesting to me are completely absent. I was excited when I found out there was a new Entrance Band album, because I was hoping to have another record's worth of Prayer For Death's awesomeness. As it is, though, this new record just doesn't hold up in comparison.

The Network - Bishop Kent Manning

Absolutely tortured freakout of a metalcore record here. Their first LP, This Is Your Pig's Portrait, was a bit disorganized. As I recently learned, this is probably due to their not having had a full-time vocalist on that record, and using a bunch of different friends and band members who normally played other instruments, so that no two tracks featured the same singer. They've got a steady lineup now, and instead of sticking with the chaos of their first album, this one goes in a more measured direction. What that translates into is lots of tortured screaming and slow-burn riffs, alternated with frantic headbanging riffs that manage to sound like insanity despite being, for the most part, perfectly comprehensible midtempo stuff. For those who felt that A Life Once Lost were never the same after The Fourth Plague: Flies, this record will hit the spot in a big way.

Slayer - World Painted Blood

Slayer hold a permanent position in my top 10 or 20 bands of all time, but in stating that, I must also admit that the apex of their career is long past. Their first five albums, and especially the three-album stretch between Reign In Blood and Seasons In The Abyss, set their legacy in stone, and any of the albums they've done since then have seemed almost anti-climactic. Even the best of them, 2001's God Hates Us All, wasn't quite on the level of those three classics. It was, however, a worthy sequel to Reign In Blood's all-killer-no-filler aesthetic, even with 90s era replacement drummer Paul Bostaph in the fold. Now, original skin-pounder Dave Lombardo has returned, which raises expectations through the roof. And yet, it is just at this point that Slayer trips up. World Painted Blood isn't terrible by any means, and I can even enjoy it when it's on, but the riffs here are subpar on the whole. It sounds like they're overthinking it, like what came naturally to them in 1986 now requires concentration to recreate. But as Neil Young will tell you, "The more you think, the more you stink." That adage is proven on this record, as riffs designed to be direct sound dumbed down, a production intended to sound raw and immediate makes the record sound like an unfinished demo, and a string of uptempo tracks designed to come across as focused just get boring. It's as if Slayer knew they were getting old, and felt that they'd have to work extra hard to prove to everyone that it wasn't affecting them. But in working extra hard, they only made it obvious that they aren't what they once were. I don't think Slayer is capable of making a BAD album, but this is the closest they've come to mediocrity, and that's a sad thing to see.

Dananananaykroyd - Hey Everyone

I never would have expected to hear a band that combines insanely upbeat poppy emo of the post-Cap'n Jazz stripe with the spastic art-core of the Blood Brothers, and yet, here are Dananananaykroyd, coming out of Glasgow and blowing my mind with a potent genre cocktail that I can't stop listening (and dancing) to. There are six members of this band, with the standard two guitars/bass/drums rock band lineup augmented by both a full-time singer and a guy who switches between singing and playing drums. The dual-vocal songs, especially "Watch This!", which is both an introduction and a sort of manifesto for the album and band as a whole, feature interplay that avoids conventional structure in favor of excited simultaneous rants. Both singers babble and scream, tripping over each other's words and lines in a manner that heightens the excitement of the song. But at other times, when the band is in their dual-drum lineup, the increased focus that it provides allows them to tap into even more potent melodies. The unstoppable bounce of "Totally Bone" only increases in intensity due to the driving percussive clatter on which the whole song is based. Meanwhile, "Black Wax" is constructed around a delicate melody without much heaviness at all. Yet both singers sing on it, and there are definitely moments when both of them are amped and in full freakout mode. It seems like Dananananaykroyd are willing to try anything that even sort of fits in with their mission, and as a result they sometimes veer so wildly within a song that they can make it seem like two different ones. It all works, though, and that's the important thing. This record is a nonstop blast, and whenever it ends, I just want to start it over again. What higher praise can I offer than that?

Passion Pit - Manners

There's a point that comes in the evolution of any particular subgenre of the indie scene, where the bands being produced by that subgenre become nigh-indistinguishable from their mainstream counterparts. With indie-techno-pop, that point has been reached, and Passion Pit's Manners is, even more than anything previously produced by LCD Soundsystem, completely indistinguishable from the sort of stuff they play in discos and on top 40 stations. Which all sounds like a condemnation, if you proceed from the first principle that indie is always better. But who says it is? The indie mentality, as an opposition to major labels and their privileging of monetary earnings uber alles, is dead and buried. With no political ideals left to fight for, that makes indie nothing but a genre. And when an indie band produces an example of a mainstream genre that can compete not only within the indie subset of that genre but right up there with the mainstream versions, shouldn't we be celebrating that? Passion Pit's "The Reeling" is the best dance single I've heard since Lady Gaga's "Poker Face," and the rest of this album, once I finally gave it a chance, proved to be full of additional examples of pure techno-pop nirvana. From the little-kid group chants on "Little Secrets" to the falsetto "na-na's" on "To Kingdom Come" and the ringing guitars on "Make Light"--which point back to the group's indie heritage no matter how deeply buried in the mix they are--this record is crammed full of pop music delights, and everyone short of the most diehard rockists should be able to appreciate them.

Four Tomorrow - Four Tomorrow

Four Tomorrow are from Japan, and have absolutely no profile in my native United States. However, because I know gamer dudes and other people who follow Japanese pop music, I occasionally hear Japanese bands I'd never come across otherwise. Four Tomorrow was the one band that that process led me to this year, and like Sambomaster, whom I discovered a few years before in the same manner, I find in their music a kind of joyous exuberance that you very rarely come across in American bands. Algernon Cadwallader have a bit of it, Cap'n Jazz had it when they were around, but I'm hard pressed to come up with examples other than those. That exuberance comes out in Four Tomorrow's choruses, which generally involve multiple members of the band shouting frantically, and in their frantic performance of uptempo punk riffs that might sound considerably more sedate in the hands of some other band. The guitars are jangly rather than distorted, but the punk influence is nonetheless at the forefront; it's because sometimes, playing something sloppily but with heart is more perfect than nailing it with technical perfection. Four Tomorrow's songs are ramshackle in construction, and played so quickly that you get the impression of all the members jumping around and falling all over themselves in the studio, just like they do in live situations. But their intrinsic jubilance, their incredible excitement at the very fact that they're a band that's playing songs, is impossible to escape. For that reason, Four Tomorrow's debut album is an infectious thrill.

Manic Street Preachers - Journal For Plague Lovers

At this point, it's hard to even talk about the Manic Street Preachers in terms of their sound. They're the sort of band that I use to explain other bands. I found out how inconvenient that could be earlier this year, though, when trying to explain The Cribs to a friend of mine by saying that they sounded somewhat like the Manics. He'd never heard the Manics, so the reference meant nothing to him. Fortunately, we could hit up Youtube and watch some Generation Terrorists/Holy Bible era MSP videos, and he immediately learned what I was talking about. When writing a review that attempts to encapsulate a band's sound WITHOUT sending the reader to Youtube, things get a bit harder. Part of what's weird about it is that all of the reference points I want to cite post-date MSP: mid-90s Britpop, post-Y2K Britpunk revival (think Libertines/Dirty Pretty Things), and oh, here's one that goes back farther--British glam-rock from the 70s, like T. Rex or Gary Glitter. Roll all these things up into a ball, and you've got the Manics, though that's only half the story, at least for their best material. Because their best material featured lyrics by rhythm guitarist Richey Edwards, who used his unique worldview and remarkable wit to give the Manics a verbal personality that was unmatched on the British alt-rock scene in the early 90s. Tragically, Richey disappeared in February 1995, never to be seen again. Fans, family members, and even the rest of the band have long held out hope that he'd reappear, but it hasn't happened yet, and hope's a hard thing to keep up after 14 years. Journal For Plague Lovers, then, is an attempt at closure, a trip through the notebooks Edwards left behind when he disappeared, in order to yield one last album featuring his lyrics. There are some gems here, too: "Only a god reserves the right to forgive those who revile him," from the title track; "crucifixion is the easy life," from "Doors Closing Slowly;" and "Jackie Collins Existential Question Time"'s excellent chorus, "Mommy, what's a sex pistol?" Surviving members James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire, and Sean Moore rise to the occasion musically as well, producing some of the band's best music of the past decade, if not longer. Still, though, it's kind of a sad thing to hear, no matter how great a record it is. Even more than the other records they've done since Richey Edwards' presumed death, it is this one that most makes one wish he was still alive, simply by pointing out how much he contributed when he was.

Sonic Youth - The Eternal

I guess the career renaissance that Sonic Youth experienced this decade is becoming something I'm used to. I say that because, unlike the three albums that preceded it, The Eternal did not shock me with its goodness, its solidity. When I had hated everything since Experimental, Jet Set, Trash and No Star, Murray Street was mindblowing--an actual good Sonic Youth record! I thought the time for those was over! Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped also got my blood flowing--and more importantly, got me to head for the record store with cash in hand, something I didn't hardly do at all in 2009, the year of my personal economic upheaval. Even if I had bought The Eternal, though, I'm not sure I would have played it anywhere near as often as I played the last three Sonic Youth albums. For one, as I said back at the beginning of this paragraph, I've gone back to expecting good records out of Sonic Youth. For another, as solid as The Eternal is, as much as it can stand up on an overall quality level to any of the past three Sonic Youth albums, it has considerably less memorable moments. There aren't any songs on this album that get stuck in my head the way "Pattern Recognition" or "Karen Revisited" or "Or" did on those last three records. It's a very solid album, but I think that solidity comes out as uniformity rather than a collection of peak moments, which leaves me with quite a bit less to take away, even if I do enjoy this album every time I put it on (which doesn't happen all that often). I'm not sure if the fault is mine, for not listening enough, or Sonic Youth's, for making an album that blends into the background a bit too easily. Regardless, this album didn't stick with me the way a lot of their albums have over the years, and while I don't think it's bad, there's definitely something missing here, the absence of which keeps it from attaining the level that the best Sonic Youth stuff easily reaches. [P.S. - I had forgotten that I actually do get "Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn" stuck in my head on occasion, which doesn't change my overall feelings about the album but deserves to be noted.]

Japandroids - Post-Nothing

This is the sort of record that, when it gets hyped, reminds me of how different my listening patterns are from the indie-rock mainstream. When it started getting big, I listened to it, and found it to be a fun record for the most part, especially on the uptempo songs. In fact, starting with "The Boys Are Leaving Town" followed by "Young Hearts Spark Fire," but ending with "Crazy/Forever," "Sovereignty," and "I Quit Girls" may be the only really obvious wrong thing about this record that I can point to. It starts with a glut of energy and ends with a glut of slowed-down haze. The songs should have been sequenced better, and unlike Counting Crows' 2008 effort, Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, there wasn't even a thematic reason not to. But whatever, getting away from sequencing and into the songs themselves, yeah, this is fuzzy bassless guitar-pop, and it's pretty well-done. However, for all the babble about noise and distortion among the indie rock faithful, it didn't seem all that noisy to me. Everything is relative, though, and this is an obvious case of my relativity being different from theirs. Bands like Wavves and No Age and these guys probably do seem like a wall of noise overload to kids who spend a lot of time listening to Animal Collective or Grizzly Bear. For dudes like me who spend a significant amount of time listening to Every Time I Die and Das Oath, Japandroids still seem pretty melodically oriented. So, that was a weird thing for me about listening to the dialogue around this record, but it doesn't mean it's any less good. One thing that I did feel made it a bit less good was a discovery I made when I saw these guys play on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon: their songs are, lyrically, insanely repetitive. They played "Wet Hair" on Fallon's show, and hearing the vocals without distortion for the first time, I realized that the song only has three lines, which are just repeated over and over and over again. I'd have to say that the vocal distortion on the album works in their favor, since it kept me from realizing that for several months. If I'd noticed that on first listen, I would probably have liked this record a lot less. And really, I don't love it; when I want to hear a distorted pop record, I generally have many more interesting specimens to turn to. But it's not bad, by any stretch.

Jemina Pearl - Break It Up

So right after the release of their second album, teenage Nashville punk band Be Your Own Pet fell apart. The only people left standing were singer/co-founder Jemina Pearl and drummer John Eatherly, who'd only been in the band for a short period of time. Frustrated but undaunted, the two of them began recording songs together, with Jemina singing and John playing all of the instruments. Eventually, they ended up with enough material to release an album, and Break It Up was the result. To a great extent, it sounds like the third Be Your Own Pet album; the majority of the songs are the same sort of catchy but snotty melodic hardcore/punk that made Be Your Own Pet so fun and memorable. However, there are additional sounds to be found here. "Ecstatic Appeal" is a disco-punk hybrid with a beat like Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" and wonderfully retro glittering synth noises augmenting the rhythm guitar riffs that propel the song. "Nashville Shores" is slower and poppier than most of the tracks on the album, and its chorus features triple-tracked harmonies from Jemina. Unfortunately, the 50s-ish ballad "I Hate People" is a less successful departure, and while one would expect a Jemina Pearl-Iggy Pop duet to be a smashing success, even the combination of the two of them can't overcome the schmaltzy monotony of the song's music. Thankfully, it's the only dud the album has to offer, and it's more than made up for by propulsive bubblegum-punk hits like "Heartbeats," "Band On The Run," and "So Sick," the latter of which closes the album with the sound of Jemina, John, and a studio full of friends energetically making vomit noises. This whole record sounds like it was a blast to make, and it's every bit as much fun to listen to. Jemina and John have recruited a band to play the songs live, and are now on tour. One hopes that regardless of what they call it, they'll keep making fun, energetic music like this.

End of Part One; More to come in a few days!