Five Albums for a cold december night (northern hemisphere only)

1. Earth: The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (2008)

I can not get enough of this album. The perfect doomy-chill dose of ambiance for a cold December’s night. I will throw it on and pick up a book, or write some notes awash in a sleepy sea of somnambulistic sedation!I throw it on and sleep away, and awake at night to hear its sleepy rotation, and fall asleep again.

2. Swallow the Sun: The Morning Never Came (2003)

Our drummer Adam once remarked upon hearing this album: “This makes me want to jump off a bridge.” How can you take that in a good way? Well, this delectable dose of Finnish doom from the nether regions of Keski-Suomi makes it work. It’s so miserably sad that it’s stunningly beautiful (if that makes sense). Melodic passages creep by in agonizing bliss. Let the snow fall all night and keep this on repeat.

3. Dissection: Storm of the Light’s Bane (1995)

I remember walking across the former “Niemansland” that was Stadt-Mitte in Berlin in 1997, while it was a wasteland of construction, and the Sony Center of today was nothing a but a big hole. The wind was blazing through the neon-hinged darkness, and the snow was coming down in bullets. I had my cassette walk-man on, raging this album, and NOTHING sounded, or stills sounds, as much like a walk in a freezing winter storm than the cold riffs that comprise “Thorns of Crimson Death.” Epic X 10,000.

4. Black Mountain: In the Future (2008)

These Vancouver, BC doomy-indie-whatever rockers sound to me like the bastard child of Black Sabbath and PJ Harvey. That of course makes no sense, but either way, I love it, and the double-vinyl I have at home spins away the hours of the evening while the ice flowers form in sheets across my window.

5. Kylesa: Static Tensions (2009)

The opening and secondary riffage on “Unknown Awareness” haunts away the hours around 3:15 AM. A nocturnal bulldozer that although originating in Savannah, reeks heavily of tundra to my Mid-Atlantic ears.

album notes part 4, pondering thievery and history

Two weeks until we start tracking drums. Hibernation has ended, and the record is coming together as we tie up loose ends, shift some lyrics around, add a few solos, and finalize the concepts.

Right now we are going with “Heirs to Thievery” as the “working” title, but will decide soon on that and the final track list around the new year. The thread that binds several songs lyrically surrounds ideas of hidden history, how we interpret our nation, and our idea of who we are culturally and collectively, as it is generally handed down to us in terms of icons, wars, struggles and triumph.

Mostly, it is the tropes in selective history that give us a sense of identity and validate how we came about as a nation and people (as outlined in any high school US history textbook). However, like all nations, there is good and bad, and we often only get one side of the story. So we have the (presumed) title track “Heirs to Thievery.” This is a line admittedly borrowed from the great punk philosopher Chris Hannah, however it is exploded into a miniature run-though of sorts of Howard Zinn’s amazing and detailed A People’s History of the United States, where thinking critically and asking pertinent historical questions often calls to attention many of the sad and ugly events in our history that are often swept under the rug.

Furthermore, it explores the somewhat shadowed history of our country (and Canada as well) that put so much wealth into the treasury’s coffers throughout the 1800’s (and beyond) through conquest, forced expulsion, murder, and westward expansion as the nation experimented with colonial ventures and other forms of appropriation.

Let us not ignore these events, no matter how ugly they may be, and no matter how deeply the cognitive dissonance may shatter prevailing conceptions of a pure and noble history. Let us learn and reconcile, no matter how seemingly inconsequential or glaringly obvious the transgressions may be, so that we may never again do such wrongs in the name of liberty or _______ .

“From Grande to St Lawrence, a nascent power heaved
Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny decreed
Push to the Pacific, across the open sea
Eliminate the natives (and leave them a museum)

Expansion had an engine- the slavery of man
In poverty those masses, tilled a broken land
As pious, grand deciders, sent armies far abroad
From Cuba to Manila,  we finally had a cause”

In our culture, “class” is still a four letter word

“Why are Unions so impotent, while workers are more exploited today than in decades?”

Earlier in the decade, in the halcyon days before 9/11, I interned with the AFL-CIO International Affairs Department (which no longer exists, apparently) as a researcher. The labor movement was receiving a boost of interest then in the wake of the new internet-driven anti-globalization movements, and the need to react to NAFTA and other corporate-friendly actions that globalized and diluted labor’s strength in the 90s.

Since then, the Bush years further chipped away at labor’s inroads, and the resulting split of many large unions away from the AFL-CIO, saw the movement in historic disarray. The following video from PBS is an excellent analysis on the current state of things hosted by Bill Moyers, in discussion with SUNY’s Mike Zweig and author BIll Fletcher.

Why is this critical? No matter what your class background is,  the labor movement inevitably worked for you at one point, as it was responsible for every (increasingly) limited right in the workplace we have today, from the eradication of child labor, the 8 hour workday, and the weekend. There is no other organized force fighting for working families on this large of a scale, and its essential it retains what little strength it has left, and develop ways to reverse its decline. To do that “class” needs to return to the lexicon of national discussion. If you have a few minutes, here we go…

I love the quote from Zweig: “Its hard to change culture“…cause that is where the battle really is….

Home again + Album Notes part 3: fed to the wolves

After another week out of town (this time visiting a cold, rainy and surprisingly un-Florida like Tampa Bay), I am back home and once more back in the songwriting fray. We have 10 solid tunes now. Shaping up to be a great mixed batch of grinders and groovers, that somehow go together, reflecting all member’s varied musical interests. Its looking like we now have these guys, but a formal announcement will be made with the correct listing and album title in a few weeks:

1. Embracing Extinction
2. The Carrion Call
3 Heirs to Thievery
4. Plague of Objects (formerly Consensual Hallucination)
5. Fed to the Wolves
6. You Lose
7.  The Spectator
8. Sleeping Giants
9.  Illuminaught
10.  ? Untititled ?

Currently finishing the lyrics to “Fed to the Wolves“….I remember when I was in high school, the urgency that was placed on us to not only compete and prepare for the ‘working world’ or university, but the horrid formality of it all, the way in which the imagination and original thinking was so suffocated by the assembly line-like process of the modern teaching method (perhaps this is what some studies somewhere have show to be effective?)

Of course, the varied student and teacher backgrounds (and competence levels) differ greatly across a nation of hundreds of millions, and teachers are sometimes forced to choose their battles given limited time and resources. However, there must be a more creative way in the mix somewhere? Some Dead Poet’s Society kind of shit?!

I suppose its an idealistic vision (what other visions are worth anything!?),  but the track “Fed to the Wolves” is a lamentation of sorts, decrying the mechanical nature of formal, secondary education processes. Many enjoy it and find it works, but in my view, there is a unnecessary focus on the eradication of creativity in the human mind, at a very crucial developmental stage. The adolescent brain is vibrant, soaking up the challenges of adulthood incessantly (like during a heated game of “Grand Theft Auto!”), as each day brings new perspectives and ways of understanding the world, in often contradictory and shattering ways.

This is to me, why those days “seemed to last forever”(in the immortal words of Bryan Adams) and you could never get to 18 fast enough, because each day upended the previous day’s notion of what is and what is not possible!

So, at the end of the indoctrination process, some start on the secondary journey of life a bit more molded, and a bit less of a dreamer, cause the world outside indeed eats dreamers alive. And so goes the trajectory of “Fed to the Wolves…”

“Imagination crushed, like misspent youth
Conformity reigns, where brilliance once thrived”

Kris Kuksi

Know Kris Kuksi? You should. I was just informed about this phenomenally intricate sculpture, painter, and artist, who currently has a sculpture exhibition in New York at the Joshua Liner Gallery called “Beast Anthology,” and as you can see, his work is  astounding…

From his website:

Kuksi’s art speaks of a timelessness–potentiality and motion attempting to reach on forever, and yet pessimistically delayed; forced into the stillness of death and eternal sleep. He treats morbidity with a sympathetic touch and symbolizes the paradox of the death of the individual by objective personification of death. There is a fear of this consciousness because it drops in upon us without mercy, and yet there is a need to appeal to it in order to provide a sense of security, however deluded that sense may be. Kuksi’s art warns us that this appeal is irrelevant, and that we should be slow to create a need for it. His themes also teach us that although death may pursue us arbitrarily, we should never neglect to mourn the tremendous loss of individual potential.

Album lyrical ponderings #2 Embracing Extinction…

"All You Can Eat" As Cultural Norm

For a supposedly superior species, we are very clever at doing ourselves in…

We (Misery Index) are due in the studio in 4 weeks to begin recording our fourth album, I think I will have the title straight by then, but for now there is another song I have been working on that Mark wrote, a Tragedy meets Napalm Death ripper called “Embracing Extinction.”

I have long been fascinated with the inventive ways humanity has progressed since the Enlightenment, to the scientific revolutions of the last century- yet at the same time we developed ever more innovative ways to destroy ourselves. Some were intentional – like nuclear weapons- but some were simply side-effects of our uniquely gluttonous nature. Since the 18th Century (give or take a few decades), the global spread of capitalism ultimately reached such deep, all-penetrating levels, that its “creatively destructive” nature defined by a cycle of relentless production and consumption threatened to have us choke on our own industrial excrement. Wiping out other species, bulldozing forests, and poisoning the oceans were just the start. What is next? “Green Capitalism” is still profit-driven, and although noble, it is perhaps too little too late….

“We process the facts, and choke on the math
Yet we can’t come to terms with ourselves
Gorge belly up to the table of wants
Its “all you can eat,”  after all!

Embracing extinction, what higher form of life,
Destroys his creations? …how far we’ve come to fall!”

The Road

The Road

I viewed the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” over the weekend in Montreal, and true to form, director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) captured the novel’s bleak, poetic prose…and more. This film is perpetually numbing, and because the text of the book reads with such vibrant simplicity, it distracts you from the apocalyptic setting that surrounds the primary characters, something the film does not.

Visualized on film, it is impossible not to feel the hunger and emptiness the Father and Son inhabit as recurring thoughts of suicide periodically creep into the scenes. I was glad the script was nearly note for note with McCarthy’s vision (much like the Coen Brothers “No Country For Old Men“), and as with the novel, the ending provides the needed glimmer of hope, which comes as a cathartic revelation of sorts after enduring the suffering travels of the two.

This is an agonizingly dark, slow film (much slower than the trailer below sells it), which is why I assume it is getting a limited release this joyful holiday season (good luck in finding a showing in non-metropolitan areas), and also why is seems to be divisive among the critics. But for me, it was on point- praise is due for all the actors- especially Robert Duvall as the ‘90 year old man’ – and I hope it finds some appreciation among McCarthy’s followers as it did with me.

Off to Montreal…

Don De Dieu Ale

I can never get enough of Quebec. I have toured and traveled many lands, yet I still have a special place for this eastern Canadian Province, and its position as a culturally unique island of Francophone eccentricity on a continent of uniformity. Les Quebecois are a fun and proud people, and it shows in various ways- like the great music scene they have engendered, to the great beers and ales one can find there, to the nature, to the poutine. I first went there in 1993, and have been back dozens of times since. This particular journey is an autumn sojourn to visit friends, take in some concerts (Dying Fetus and the Faceless tomorrow night!), and of course, go see the Montreal Canadians play at home. So for the next week, I will be traversing north of the St. Lawrence River, partaking in the revelry with Les Habitants. Til then, Tabernac!

“The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power”

Church and State (and Commerce) are more intertwined than ever. The cadre that runs the show in this nation network for Jesus through a group known as the Family, and author Jeff Sharlet (Harper’s Magazine)  recent book on these guys, called “The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power” is out in paperback. Here is a brief interview from last summer.

Juck Foe Lieberman

The Pest on the Hill

The only thing good that came out of Al Gore’s loss in 2000, is that this Janus face never got to be Vice Prez. Why? He, like most politicians, are so full of the excrement it leaks out their ears. For example, even with his purportedly empathetic “religious” rhetoric, he still refuses to back the Public Option and give millions of uninsured some kind of affordable health care. I wonder why. The right-honorable Junior Senator from Connecticut has received over $920,000 in campaign contributions from the health insurance industry. Furthermore, he undoubtedly loves all the face time he is getting on the Sunday morning circuit, and his oversized ego apparently feels a bit burned after the Dems turned on him (but not enough) when he openly endorsed McCain during last year’s election (not mention support for the Iraq invasion).

Either way, it is obvious I am not  fan, and him, along with all the Republican Senators in congress, who profess to be loving Christians, Jews, caring, religious whatevers etc -yet rake in millions and live the high life, have no place in denying working people the basic human right to affordable and/or free health care. Citizens of Connecticut, and Dems of Congress,  the time is long overdue to shut this cog down and expel him back from whence he came.  Counting the days….