It's the Economy, Stupid

Separated at birth?

Political maestro James Carville shepherded Bill Clinton to two terms of balanced budgets and relative world peace with his simple insight that in a post-Cold War world it was the economy that would be the electorate's overriding concern. Just to make sure campaign staffers stayed on message, Carville posted a note on the office wall: "It's the economy, stupid."

Tapping in to its punk and hardcore roots, grindcore is preoccupied by social and political topics. While it does its best to spit bile in the direction of religion, politics and other easily identifiable villains, grindcore does not do a good job of addressing thornier, more complicated issues like the economy. Granted, there's only so much you can say in 75 seconds, but it's a topic -- especially in the depth of the worst global downturn since the Great depression -- that's ripe for some angry discussion.
Here are four artists who keep their mind on their money and their money on their mind.

Tools of the (Free) Trade

No other band has ever been as attuned to the economic unease of modern blue collar workers as Benumb. Where other grind bands were content to choke out vague denunciations of The System and how it needs to be Taken Down, Benumb penned factory floor ditties about offshored jobs, disappointing unions and lives spent paycheck to paycheck with none of Bruce Springsteen's bullshit romanticism. One of the best examples is Withering Strands of Hope's "WTO: Disintergration of the Working Class," which detailed the aftershocks of the Clinton administration's obsession with international free trade deals. The treaties that ultimately tied the world together more tightly economically came at the expense of blue collar wage earners.



Exhume to Consume

Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of chatting up Kill the Client's Champ Morgan will tell you that dude is not shy about sharing his libertarian outlook on life. The guy's caustic outlook on life is perfect for a "pox on both their houses" approach to America's useless, bifurcated political landscape. And like every true Ron Paualite I've ever met, Morgan is also attuned to the modern economic landscape. Cleptocracy's "Consumption is Intoxication" could have been just another "buying shit is evil" song. What elevates the tune is that Morgan zeros in on the debt and funding mechanisms that make our consumption-driven existence possible. It's that extra perceptive step that makes Kill the Client such a force.



Occupy Everywhere

Matthew Widener's impending revolution will begin at the banks. The rabble rousing Liberteer ringleader can be found philosophically camped outside of Wall Street's rapacious halls. The avowed 99 Percenter has been pretty clear about his social/economic philosophy. So it's no surprise that a song like "Usurious Epitaph" takes on the economic chains that bind us. That loan you took out to get ahead in life ultimately only holds you back, Liberteer says. A lifetime of scrimping and saving and living paycheck to credit card only to be wiped out in a catastrophic economic collapse would make even the most mild mannered middle class consumer into a frothing Marxist revolutionary.



Candy Land

Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain" may just sound like a goofy Candy Land tune about a pancreas-crushing paradise of diabetic delights. But if you pay closer attention to the lyrics and put the song into its proper context, suddenly it becomes a snapshot of the economic instability that led up to the Great Depression. In the hands of The Oily Menace, the song also takes on a fierce new urgency, getting a 21st Century update for a new era of bankruptcy, both moral and monetary.

Demo-lition Derby: Acid Shark

Acid Shark
Bombs Away
Soundcloud
Acid Shark’s Amebixed punk sounds very British. At least in the way that movies have conditioned Americans to think about our colonial cousins. The Britishosity (totally a word, I swear) rests largely on the singer’s voice, which sounds like someone who routinely employs English colloquialisms like “Oi!” and “Right you are, luv” in between calling for a pint of bitter at the quaint local pub in a decidedly blue collar swath of smoke-choked London. Please none of you disabuse me of this stereotype because it makes Acid Shark that much more fun.
Reinforcing that British charm is that Acid Shark’s three songs sound like Amebix if the crusty forefathers had jettisoned all that maudlin crap about friends dying in motorcycle accidents to pen more bangers in the mold of “Arise!” Acid Shark will not overwhelm your senses with either their musical or lyrical originality (especially lyrical—songs largely consist of the title being shouted repeatedly), but it’s a fun little demo. The songs all have a propulsive vibe, like Acid Shark is rushing to the end before they collapse in on themselves. The knotty guitars have a twisty little crunch to them, though the drums occasional blur into flapping mush.
At only three songs, Acid Shark’s demo does what it should. Namely, it encapsulates a rousing football hooligan spirit not so much in a rioting down the road sense as it is kicking back an ale with a few mates after a rousing match. Essentially, Acid Shark know how to tease just enough to make you want to hear more.

Compiling Autumn Part 4: Jigsaw

Start from the outside find the edges
Look for patterns in the seams
Some pieces fit together wrong
Remaining parts seem to fit nowhere
But you can force my teeth together
If you think that it will make you happy
“Jigsaw”

Come Apart Together, Come Together Alone

Recording The Inalienable Dreamless was different from past Discordance Axis sessions in one notable respect:
“We were prepared this time. That was the huge difference,” drummer Dave Witte said, laughing. “The way it worked in the end, the other records we would record a song on the boombox and go, ‘Done,’ and record another on a boombox. Then we’d bring the boombox to the studio and then record it for real on the tape. Relearn it and record it.”
Unlike Ulterior or Jouhou where songs were relearned, rewritten or simply created whole in the studio, Discordance Axis entered Trax East in late 1999 practiced to perfection. Rehearsals found the band playing the record straight through in order twice as they built up the stamina and cohesion necessary to deliver the demanding songs. The level of preparation for The Inalienable Dreamless was “unheard of” for Discordance Axis, Witte said.
“That was the first record we were all generally excited about and rehearsed in advance,” he said.
Honed to precision, the band realized they needed to record the music before they lost their edge.
“At some point we’re like, we’re done,” guitarist Rob Marton said. “We’ve got to get into the studio. We prepared I don’t know how many months before. We’ve got to be spot on.”
But all their preparation was nearly wasted when engineer Steve Evetts, who had worked with the band previously, quit Trax East two weeks before the session. The studio wanted Discordance Axis to push back the recording until mid-2000, something the band said would have been devastating.
“We were right at the razor’s edge at that point,” vocalist Jon Chang said. “You can only stay that good for so long. We were practicing multiple times a week. We never did that kind of shit for Discordance Axis. We were a once a week band, if we were lucky. If we had to delay, it would have been a disaster.”
Narrowly avoiding a delay, Discordance Axis enlisted Boston engineer Jon D’Uva at the last minute. D’Uva came recommended by Bill T. Miller, who had recorded Jouhou. One of Miller’s assistants, D’Uva had assisted on albums like Grief’s 1994 sludge touchstone Come to Grief, but he had never helmed his own session or worked with a grindcore band.
“[Miller] was like, ‘Hey do you want to do this band in Jersey.’ I wasn’t even doing this full time yet,” D’Uva said. “I had a day job. I said, ‘Let them fire me.’ ”
The four day session – which included recording, mixing and mastering – was a first for D’Uva in many ways. It was his first solo shot as a producer, his first project where a label was involved and it was also his first exposure to grindcore and Discordance Axis.
“He had never done fast music, but he did a great job,” Witte said. “He captured the band the way it sounds. It was a lot different from other people we worked with.”
Before D'Uva travelled to Trax East, Miller had given him old Discordance Axis records by way of background, but the session was a learning experience.
“I had touched upon it, but this was definitely intense,” D’Uva said. “The music was not understated. On the session when you’re an engineer, you can be engineering any style once you’re focused in. You’re not even listening to what the music is. You’re very technical. You’re making sure all the machines were on. It was all tape then.”

Mimetic

D’Uva calls himself The Inalienable Dreamless' "ghost engineer" because he was accidentally left off the album's liner notes. Though he laughs at the oversight, D'Uva also downplays his role in recording the album, choosing to describe himself as an engineer rather than a producer. As D’Uva describes the sessions, Discordance Axis came prepared, were able to nail most of the songs in a single take or two and immediately knew which takes felt right.
“For the most part it was a self-produced album,” D’Uva said. “They knew what takes were good. They knew what was tight enough. The sound of the band was defined. I wasn’t making decisions on the tempo or the arrangement.”
Witte and Chang said recording The Inalienable Dreamless was by far the easiest session in Discordance Axis’ turbulent relationship with recording studios.
“It was a not a nightmare recording session,” Chang said. “There were hard things in it, but we were never at each other’s throats, which was unusual for us.”
Marton’s recollections, however, are not so rosy. The compressed recording schedule took an extreme toll on the guitarist as he labored to nail the intricate parts he had written.
“I think I hated it as much as any other recording we did,” he said. “Jouhou was hellish and we couldn’t get anything right. [The Inalienable Dreamless] was a grueling three days. We weren’t even halfway through and my arm felt like cement. The songs were hard to play. They weren’t easy. It was the most grueling recording experience of all of them. I vowed to never to do it again. When that recording was done I absolutely hated it. I was like, what did we do? How it sounded in my head and how it came out, it was just too different. It was two different sounds. It was just the result of cramming for three days. That’s what we had. There was no other way we could have done it. It was hard.”
Chang has his own, unique way of motivating his bandmates during the laborious recording session. It involved holding up signs during takes that read “‘fuck your mother,’ something totally douchebaggy,” Chang said.
D’Uva said he recorded The Inalienable Dreamless the way he would have approached a jazz ensemble. He set up the microphones around the room – using only about half of the 24 tracks available in the studio – and turned Discordance Axis loose. Once the desired tones were dialed in, D’Uva said the actual recording flowed smoothly with minimal mistakes and very few attempts to punch back in and correct errors.
“Those guys didn’t play with a click track, didn’t play with headphones, nothing was edited: as is,” D’Uva said. “Jon sang while the band was playing. Ninety-five to 99 percent of that album is a live a capture.”
Though D’Uva said he had no input into the band’s songwriting or arrangements, he did suggest subtle touches to strengthen the album’s sound, including adding a subharmonic bass synthesizer to Marton’s guitar. The effect added extra presence without sacrificing the sharp, trebly sound. It helped create that sleek, vicious guitar sound that defines The Inalienable Dreamless.
“The guitar stayed bright and in your face and the box created the sub-bass,” D’Uva said.
For his part, Marton said The Inalienable Dreamless’ signature guitar sound was a matter of “trusting the producer and trying to get the best sound we could.”
Though the session was already short, Witte had an extra incentive to quickly capture his parts. Not knowing he was recording a career-defining album, the drummer was more interested in the holiday festivities at work.
“It was all quick. It was my company’s Christmas party, so I was racing to get the drum tracks to get out of there,” he said, laughing.
D’Uva said Witte was able to make the Christmas party because of his professionalism and practice.
“I remember Dave coming in and being surprised. This heavy aggressive band, his drum kit looked like a jazz drum kit,” D’Uva said. “The drums were nicely tuned. The toms weren’t too big. In my experience all the metal guys have these huge toms. … A drummer’s drummer, I thought, a guy who really studied, who is precise about his kit and precise about his drumming and he was.”

Attrition

Thanks to the grueling rehearsal schedule, Discordance Axis were able to capture the songs live in only a handful of takes without overhauling them the way they had during past sessions.
“We weren’t totally jacked up on caffeine like we were on Jouhou, but we were really excited about the music,” Chang said. “It came out pretty good. It was a good record. It was the only record where we went into the studio and didn’t radically change half the songs on the record.”
While Discordance Axis didn’t make wholesale changes to the songs in the studio as they had in the past, a few of The Inalienable Dreamless’ songs were reworked at the time. Witte excised a section from “Oratorio in Gray” the band had dubbed the “monkey blast” because he couldn’t synch up the timing properly.
“I personally never heard what was wrong with it,” Chang said. “At the time I didn’t understand what the problem was. That’s the only part of the record that got cut.”
The band did attempt to overdub the guitars on “The Third Children” because on the second verse “the drums are not even remotely following the guitar because it was so hard to record that song,” Chang said.
“Dave eventually kept going and said, ‘That’s my last take,’ ” he said. “That’s the only song of the record we tried to overdub the main guitar track to kind of fix it and we gave up at some point.”
The hardest song to set to tape, at least for Witte, was “Compiling Autumn.” However, all of the laborious practice sessions and the chemistry he had fostered with Marton paid off when Witte’s headphones fell off during the last take for the song.
“That was the days before punch-ins. I’d play songs multiple times to get it right,” Witte said. “That song was so hard because the midsection was super fast for me. We tried it over and over and there’s this accent in the middle where we lock up in the grind part. That’s one of the ones we were having a hard time with rehearsing. We never really had it down. The last time we did it my headphones fell off and I was feeling the song. They fell off and we kept going. We totally nailed it without me hearing the guitar.”
Though he’s proud of the work, Witte did say he still has minor qualms with how The Inalienable Dreamless sounds.
“I think it was more me not knowing what I wanted at the time,” he said. “The toms sounded great. I like everything the way it is. I wasn’t stoked on the snare drum sound. It’s my own fault.”
As much as The Inalienable Dreamless has defined Discordance Axis’ career, the album has also served as a landmark for D’Uva even as he’s expanded his repertoire, recording jazz bands and folk music. Though he’s never returned to grindcore since, the album represents an early peak in his work.
“It was definitely a proud moment,” D’Uva said. “It was the most intense record that I’ve ever recorded. Since then as an engineer, I’ve run the gamut of genres from plain old thrash to the most jazz and folk music there is. I remember after recording it, bringing it back and playing it for people and they were pretty impressed. Even though it was a little too heavy and fast for them, they thought, ‘This was the sickest, tightest stuff I’ve ever heard even if it’s not my thing.’ Even then it was, ‘Oh wow, this is a crazy record.’ ”

G&P Review: Dephosphorus/Great Falls

Dephosphorus/Great Falls
Split
Hell Comes Home
Apparently Dephosphorus are gonna keep dribbling out new music in spurts until your balls are swollen and cerulean in anticipation for Night Sky Transform. Here's one more astrogrind tune to keep you primed.
Unlike the comparatively pithy pack of songs they gave us on the Wake split, Dephosphorus go long with “Stargazing and Violence.” The lengthiest song in their repertoire to date, Dephosphorus had me worried at first because the first 30 seconds of the nearly four minute tune is spent beating to death one stomping riff. I’d feared the Greeks may have lost their touch, but then “Stargazing and Violence” supernovas into crystalline black metal spidering. That gets blended with blastbeat urgency and guitarist Thanos Mantas' constantly shifting musical architecture that manages to bleed psychedlic swirls, shrill thrashings and downtempo introspection into a single protean tune. The one real misstep to the song are some really sour clean vocals at the midpoint, but they’re mercifully short and then erupt to one of drummer Nikos Megariotis' finest blastbeat moments, a snare rolling snap that reminds of me of Kataklysm’s Max Duhamel at his best. “Stargazing and Violence” is only one song and one with some admittedly awkward components, but it shows once again how fearless Dephosphorus can be. They take a lot of chances here and most of them pay off. I've heard the ambitious Night Sky Transform and this actually serves as a nice Rosetta stone to decrypt Dephosphorus' evolution since Axiom.
Along for the ride is Great Falls, which features of Shane Mehling of Playing Enemy/excoriating album review fame. Like Mehling’s prior outfit, Great Falls dabble in aslant noise rock on “Everything But Lightning.” The nimble song refuses to walk a straight line when it could parkour its way up a wall instead. It could be my love for Playing Enemy clouding my judgment, but I kept waiting for that spinal compression beat down to kick in and it never came. Playing Enemy songs, no matter how convoluted, always found a way to circle back around to jack you in the chicklets and it didn’t happen here. It’s hard to judge a band by one song, but I missed that moment when the riffs click into something monstrous. However, I’d definitely be interested in hearing more.
On the physical front, Hell Comes Home have done with a fantastic job with the packaging, including that face only Mama Cthulhu could love. And for those of you who haven’t given in to the seduction of the needle, the 7-inch also includes a free download.

[Full disclosure: Dephosphorus sent me a review copy.]

Say You Want a Revolution: Matthew Widener Talks Life, Liberteer and the Pursuit of Happiness

Right now, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times, it is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness, it is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of incredulity, it is the season of Light, it is the season of Darkness, it is the spring of hope, it is the winter of despair, we have everything before us, we have nothing before us, we are all going direct to heaven, we are all going direct the other way - in short, the period is so far like the French Revolution, that some of its noisiest authorities insist on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
Some shit never changes; just ask Chuck Dickens. Or if a brick of turgid prose and fabulously face-punchable characters ain't exactly your thing, Matthew Widener will give you the 27 minute tutorial on economic unrest and social instability with Liberteer's debut album Better to Die on Your Feet Than Live on Your Knees. A record that bears close study and gives back what you put into it, Better to Die on Your Feet Than Live on Your Knees has a sweep that can only be described as operatic. If the world were a more artistically just place, this would be the soundtrack to the latest film version of Les Miserables. Liberteer's 17 songs are all of a piece, intentionally written as a whole with repeating motifs and musical callbacks throughout. Widener (who is also one of Cretin's resident freaks) said that was the goal from the beginning, to write, what he called "one long song." And all it took was a wholesale revolution in his musical approach.
"I study orchestration, as best as an amateur can, but I have read the mainstay texts on it," Widener said. "So I’d had this idea for the album, to make it more epic in scope, and I knew I was going to include orchestral and marching band instrumentation, so it made sense to use motifs and arrangements that supported that. It seemed to me song breaks were a vestigial thing. Why write around that concept, if I had all these lofty ideas that ran counter? So I started writing the album in order, first track to the last. I learned that I had to identify riffs I had already written in previous songs, and then foster them into grander statements later. Sometimes I had foresight to do this when writing the original riffs, but other times it was like sifting through mud for gold flecks. What also happened was writing great riffs later on in the album, and wishing they were present and foreshadowed earlier. So I’d go back and insert them, rewrite stuff to accommodate those later themes. So it was a strange way to write, but I got used to it, and the crosspollination started to invigorate me. You write differently when you have the long view like that."
If the thought of banjos and horns rubbing shoulders with your grind scares you, this maybe isn't your album. However, every note of the record has a purpose. Widener said the additional instrumentation had a twofold purpose to conjure up revolutionary fervor and to give your earholes enough of a break to process what you're hearing.
"I found out early on that the ear fatigues without the benefit of song breaks. In grindcore, those song breaks give the ear a rest. Psychologically, we know we can gulp some air and make a decision to continue or turn it off," he said. "Typical songwriting gives the listener agency. But this operatic method was going to alienate. So I wanted to simulate the same effect that a song break gives, and decided I’d compose a non-metal instrumentation part every few minutes, which would give the ear a break from distortion and blasts. This worked, I think. It also gave me time to seed the major leitmotivs, which came instrumentally as either grand introductions or culminating recapitulations, depending on where in the album they appear. I really like composing in this way, turns out. For other bands, the traditional format is best. Liberteer albums will continue to be one long song. It’s going to be inseparable from the project."

The Spirit of '76

Solo project Liberteer builds on expands the themes Widener had touched on with his prior band Citizen. With that trio, Widener had rallied for a new breed of patriotism that put the the populations' interests ahead of those of the state. To provide that requisite rallying cry he had extensively studied national anthems, dissecting them for musical themes. Those studies came in handy when it came time to write for Liberteer, which relies on more than your friendly neighborhood power chord to stir the emotions.
"The most important thing about my early studies on nationalistic and folk music was learning the proper modes and key changes when it comes to stirring music. Most of which aren’t used in metal," he said. "Even the minor key is tampered with in extreme metal, with heavy emphasis on the tritone, the minor second, and the fourth—all intervals that smudge the tonality of a key, that rob it of expectation and psychology. I’ve never been too afraid of using major keys in my metal. Take a look at Cretin. But I think studying those historic pieces taught me a lot about songwriting in general. So that stayed with me. There aren’t any explicitly sampled songs on the Liberteer album, like in Citizen. I think it’s more the concept of learning to unlearn. I do have a fondness for the early Americana musical idiom, which is really a European transplant, and use a lot of it in Liberteer. Some people draw a conclusion about that, but I’m not really trying to make a statement with it. I just think it sounds emotional, in a stirring way, with instrumentation that evokes a groundswell, of a primitive and participatory nature."

Patriot Games

An album with orchestration this demanding requires a conceptual foundation that says something a little more involved than "this shit sucks." Widener makes you realize just how fucking lazy so much of our so-called political grind really is. Too many political bands are content to wind up the audience for half an hour, preach to them in the most vague terms and send everybody home self-satisfied and content that they've been appropriately outraged at the acceptable targets. Instead, Liberteer demands you get up off your ass and really wrestle with issues of personal autonomy and collective responsibility in ways that are more nuanced and demanding than any number of albums you have on your iPod right now.
"I think that’s the very intention of anarchism, how do you reconcile liberty and the collective, how do you make both work together? When they seem to be mutually exclusive? That’s the ongoing dialogue of anarchism, really. And so you might be mistaking my honesty and inclusion of differing anarchist thought for the total lack of an ideology. The album does have an ideology when compared to other political viewpoints," Widener said. "It can be somewhat of a litmus test, in that many will identify with some elements of the lyrics, but overlook the rest, like a confirmation bias. American Libertarian free-market types will ignore the socialist elements and focus on personal liberty. But it’s not fair to do that. Because a big part of the album is about social responsibility and compassion, and I wouldn’t rank U.S. Libertarians as being very high on the compassion scale, with their unkind interpretations of 'fairness' and narrow definitions of 'liberty.' Theirs is an ideology totally incompatible with anarchism. They exalt capitalism as some arbiter of fairness, and to the anarchist, capitalism creates a hierarchy of economic oppression, the exact opposite of liberty."
There are themes at play on Better to Die on Your Feet Than Live on Your Knees that will appeal to Tea Party patriots and outraged Occupy Wall Street protestors alike. However, when listeners sit down and really wrangle with what Widener is saying, they'll find he's advocating for a very specific breed of social anarchism.
"I think the real reason the album seems different from most political grind is because of this social anarchist element," he said. "It’s funny, most bands that either self-identify or are categorized as anarchist, at least in punk and grind, are of the individualist anarchist branch, where personal liberty and expression trump the social. But Liberteer is strongly social anarchist. So the tone feels a bit different, doesn’t it? I know singing about tolerance and getting along with your neighbors isn’t very metal, ha! But I’m not too concerned with metal heritage, or fitting into a whine-and-grind circle-A stencil aesthetic format. I believe there’s room in grindcore for hope."

Semper Fi

Topics like patriotism and social responsibility may sound corny in grindcore, but Widener has spent a lifetime coming to terms with his relationship with society and his fellow citizens. That includes a stint in the Marines, where this (unreformed) Dungeonmaster first grappled with his place in the broader culture. The topic of metal musicians and their relationship to the military continues to fascinate me, and Widener said his experience with the Marines was an instrumental step in his political evolution.
"I joined the Marines out of a misguided sense of machismo and desperation. My patriotism was borne of fear. I know this firsthand," Widener said. "So when I talk to a nationalistic person, they can’t bullshit me, I’ve been there. I believe that emotions are symptoms of existential anguish and other fears caused by this anguish. Ultimately, our concerns drive us. And these emotions, the tricky thing about them is that they feel essential, they feel like imperatives, and we easily mistake them for the thing in itself. Like a prepackaged truth. How fucked up is that? It’s dangerous. It’s like if doctors mistook the symptoms of a disease for the disease itself! When I was young, I didn’t realize that we’re supposed to question our feelings. I just wore them like a fucking football jersey. Patriotism was probably where a lot of my fears were channeled. Typical stuff: fear of dying, fear of being poor, fear of the other. I was not popular in high school. I was still a virgin. I read comic books. I was a Dungeonmaster. The military promised some sort of vague sense of power or righteousness. So I enlisted. They nab a lot of guys that way. By the way, I’m still a Dungeonmaster, and have roleplayed every Friday since 1982, ha."
The trip through the military, with its rigid hierarchies and emphasis on blind obedience, set Widener on the path to introspection and social awareness.
"It wasn’t until much later, in my thirties, that I worked on myself, read a lot of philosophy, psychotherapy, understanding the ways I trick myself, and really put the time into sorting through my bullshit," he said. "I came out the other side realizing that nationalism is all about identification at the exclusion of others, built around prejudice and an inflated sense of the self. Like, is there really any reason to be proud of where you were arbitrarily born? For fuck’s sake, it’s a justification to practice xenophobia and tribalism, all those things Ernest Becker wrote about. But I don’t have any regrets. I wouldn’t want to take it back. I like where I ended up, and it took that to get me here, along with the rest of messy living. But it’s not a choice I’d make again. And I actively discourage people from enlisting. There are better ways to learn life lessons."
Liberteer packs a life's worth of lessons into less than half an hour. When you survey the musical, economic and political unrest that characterize late 2012, it's a far, far better thing that Widener has done.

Compiling Autumn Part 3: Loveless

Let me share my heart with you
As I'm guided by the dead to a miserable end
“Vacuum Sleeve”

Information Sniper

Following on the themes developed with Jouhou, The Inalienable Dreamless was an emotional purgative for vocalist Jon Chang, a lyrical exorcism for feelings of pain, isolation and loneliness.
Chang said he often “retreated from people into fiction and games,” and he turned those passions into metaphors to express his anger and anxieties. With Jouhou, Discordance Axis had already moved away from grindcore’s narrow, safe, stereotypical preoccupation with social and political themes to delve into something more personal. Those ideas would flower to their fullest expression with The Inalienable Dreamless. The first album, Ulterior, was Discordance Axis’ attempt to place Napalm Death and Assuck’s political fixations “in a more interesting place.” However, as he matured, Chang said he found punk and grind’s sloganeering “naïve.”
“I didn’t want to write about politics,” Chang said. “If you’re in college, if you really have your eyes open, you realize so much of it’s bullshit. They all try to make it so black and white.”
Beginning with “Continuity,” the last song on Discordance Axis’ 1995 split with Melt-Banana, Chang said he strove to “go a little bit deeper.” It would become the Rosetta Stone song in Discordance Axis’ catalog, influencing how Chang approached his lyrics for both Jouhou and The Inalienable Dreamless.
The cancer-clouded song is full of evocative imagery and clever wordplay. Tongue-twisting lines like “Life tuned to a time table” show a deeper focus on lyrical rhythm while “Decapitated body of information/ Reassembled wrong into a smile” placed a new emphasis on capturing feelings of anxiety and unease. It’s an inwardly-focused song that captured Chang’s growing obsession with interpersonal relationships. With "Continuity" Chang began to focus more on “where I’m at rather than where I thought the world was at.”
“'Continuity’ was the first time I crossed over to write a song that tapped myself as the base and layered metaphor on top of it, rather than starting with fiction [or] abstract material to provide the base and inserting myself somewhere in between,” he said.

Euphoria Dejection

With his first steady job out of college, Chang said he was able to indulge his passion for anime and manga, making several trips to Japan every year just to watch movies or stock up on games and books that were not available in the United States.
“I was saving all my money, and I kept going to Japan,” Chang said. “Every four to six months I would go to Japan. One [trip] would be long, three or four weeks, and one would be short, a couple of days. I was showing up to movie premieres. I had never had money in my entire life. Now that I was making it, I wanted to spend it. I’ve never said anything about materialism. I’m such a collector.”
He increasingly drew inspiration from games, science fiction and the anime as lyrical springboards to express himself as a songwriter during that period. Though commonplace today, in the mid-1990s it was quite a radical departure from the narrow list of topics metal found acceptable lyrical fodder.
“It wasn’t anything that intentional at that point,” Chang said. “As a young person I didn’t understand where I was going with my work. I couldn’t think critically about my work at that point. … Jouhou was the start of that. Those metaphors seemed perfectly natural to me. They didn’t seem like they were coming out of left field."
Ultimately, The Inalienable Dreamless would be shaped by Chang’s discovery of the movie Evangelion Death : Evangelion Rebirth. The movie and the related anime series would serve as the master metaphor for Discordance Axis’ final album and much of Chang’s subsequent songwriting with his later band GridLink as well.
“I had a functional understanding of Japanese. I could follow a decent part of the movies I watched," Chang said. "I saw Evangelion and I understood 15 percent of what I saw, but emotionally, I understand 100 percent of it. It was like the death of a friend watching that movie. There’s been nothing like that in my life that I’ve been that crazy with, ever."
The themes of loss, courage, maturity and the desperate need for approval from distant parent figures that drove the story, ostensibly about Japanese teens suiting up in giant robots to fend off an alien invasion, made such an impression that it became the defining reference point for developing The Inalienable Dreamless’ lyrical conceits on songs such as "Pattern Blue," "Angel Present" "The End of Rebirth" and "The Third Children." Chang even credited himself as Eva05 in the album's liner notes in tribute to the series.
Chang connected with the emotional struggle of Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno, who conceived and directed the series following a four-year bout with depression. The series was groundbreaking and controversial in Japan at the time for both its involved, psychologically rich plotline and for its violence.
“Evangelion is my life, and I have put everything I know into this work. This is my entire life. My life itself,” Anno said in a 1996 interview with anime and manga magazine Protoculture Addicts.
It was that kind of dedication to an artistic endeavor that drove Chang as he prepared himself for what would become The Inalienable Dreamless. With Anno as his inspiration, Chang said he felt compelled to make something as profound and personal as Evangelion, to replicate that experience in audio form.
“[Anno] had gone into a massive depression and retreated from society for a year, and when he returned he had written this thing,” Chang said. “He got this thing made somehow. I decided I had to write a new kind of record. If I wanted to do anything creatively ever again, I had to go to the same level this guy went. Me and the world and who am I and who I want to be.”
Focused on the musical end of The Inalienable Dreamless, drummer Dave Witte and guitarist Rob Marton allowed Chang free rein with his lyrics.
“We’d just let Jon go wild. We’d do the music. In our mind, we’re the musicians. We’d write the songs and play the music. He’s the singer. Who are we to tell him what to do? All three of us expressed ourselves the way we wanted to,” Witte said.
While there’s a searing emotional honesty that screams through Chang’s performance on The Inalienable Dreamless, the lyrics are intentionally shrouded in several layers of metaphor and striking imagery. Chang declines to discuss the individual meanings of his songs. Instead, he said he prefers for listeners to draw their own conclusions, infusing the songs with their own, personal interpretations. However, as with Jouhou, Chang said much of The Inalienable Dreamless is obsessed with the difficulties of interpersonal relationships, particularly those with women.
“I just didn’t know how to relate to women at all. I still don’t know if I do, despite being married,” Chang said. “Jouhou is so much about my inability to have a stable relationship with a chick. It sounds funny now, but half the fucking songs are about that shit.”
Chang’s bandmates are also content to leave the lyrics unexamined, respecting the singer’s emotions and his reticence.
“It’s super angry and poetic. I don’t have any emotional attachment to it because it’s cryptic,” Witte said. “There was a lot of inner hatred, too, that shined through from Jon, personally. At the end of the day I was really proud of that record. ‘I will live forever. Alone.’ That pretty much gets to the point.”

G&P Review: Wet Nightmare

Wet Nightmare
Wet Nightmare
Bandcamp
A clever song title goes a long way toward grabbing eyeballs in a media saturated environment where listeners have endless options and their spastic, ADHDed attention is the most precious commodity musicians can envision. Total Fucking Destruction set the bar pretty high with "Seth Putnam is Wrong About a Lot of Things But Seth Putnam is Right About You" and Wormrot made me giggle like a school girl with "You Suffer...By Why is it My Problem?" Just thinking about either of those song titles is enough to send me to my album collection to binge like a comedy grind crackhead. Wet Nightmare come pretty close to those heights with "Insect Welfare," which once made me blow Fruity Pebbles all over my laptop screen. So the duo have that going for them, even if their humor is still a tad hit or miss ("Raped in the Superdome" is less clever than it is tasteless in an Anal Cunty kind of way).
And speaking of Boston's most overdosed blurcore hooligans, Wet Nightmare straddle their earliest, loosest blastiest material with something more structured a la early Napalm Death, if you need a musical reference point. So while all of that will definitely pique my interest, Wet Nightmare's challenge is holding my attention. And this, unfortunately, is where they're going to struggle a bit. Musically, their presentation is just spiffy, but like a lot of bands out there making their own way, Wet Nightmare's miniscule recording budget saps their songs of that sonic jolt to the adrenals that makes grindcore click. The guitars are wiry and probing but never pierce too far below the dermis and the drums sound like they've been smothered in feather pillows in spots. That's not to say there's anything particularly wrong with Wet Nightmare's music unless you're turned off by tasteless rape jokes (see also: "Donald Flagg Was an Honorable Man"). Wet Nightmare's task is to translate their racket into something that has the zing to stand out in a crowded field.

[Full disclosure: Wet Nightmare sent me a download.]