Words by Peter Tanski
Peter Tanski grew up in the small but thriving Wilkes-Barre/Scranton area, fronting several bands and founding the music and literary fanzine, Exmortus. After a brief stint living in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and writing for Legends Magazine, he returned to Pennsylvania where he began to work with web based music site NEPA Rocks. He currently fronts the melodic hardcore/punk band, Heart Out and hosts The Book of Very Very Bad Things PodZine.
Samuel L. Bronkowitz Presents “That’s Armageddon!“
As I put pen to paper this month, the very air itself has been deemed too toxic to breathe. The atmosphere is bedraggled and one hasn’t the capability of seeing the endless mountains of Northeastern Pennsylvania, the homes one block away, or even the sun itself. The wildfires that are laying waste to the wilderness in our Canadian neighbor’s lands have sullied the Eastern US, and New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania are especially blighted by it.
This snapshot of Armageddon is a reminder of how tenuous our continued existence is on our home world. It is also a reminder that any apocalypse deserves a good soundtrack. The glum and punchy sounds of Billy Idol’s first few long players always exuded a sort of PVC and leather clad, cockney-Mad-Max-as-directed-by-John-Carpenter feel. Nobody takes the flavors of that, Killing Joke, Jarvis Cocker, and Leonard Cohen, and makes it their own quite like Damien Moyal (of Hardcore outfits Culture, Shai Hulud, As Friends Rust,On Bodies), aka Damien Done. The second full length in that particular project’s discography, “Total Power” (Mind Over Matter Records) is a departure and a redesign of the band’s sound. There is an honest to Rozz goth song too (“Pray For Me”)! At least, as gothy as Damien can be. There are myriad layers to the record’s onion and all are bursting with nihilistic flavor.
“You’ll be scared Shitless!”
The darkwave tinted, industrial minded, and dreampop worshipping Now After Nothing (unsigned) have been shaking up the indie scene with 2 singles! “Sick Fix”, the maudlin disco ball banger track, is an earworm so hungry, I may have sacrificed precious grey matter due to it. The ode to unhealthy attachments, “Fixation Fantasy”, offers a different drive, yet an equally morose mood. This duo is poised to take the nocturnal realm by any means necessary, and we are their cheerleaders.
Swedish Post-Punk Chanteuse, Viola Travels (Carmella Karlsson of It’s For Us solo outing) offers a daring and fully realized vision with “Bloodline” (Novoton). The always dynamic and fun Protomartyr showed us their guitar effects racks with “Formal Growth in the Desert” (Domino Recording Co.) and we liked what we had seen and heard. Check out the single “Elimination Dances” and see if we were wrong.
“The most realistic depiction of death, doom , and destruction in motion picture history…”
And, as if it were prerequisite, Soft Kill are back in the conversation again! I know that they are mentioned often, but that’s only due to how prolific Tobias Grave is. After last years’ early 4th quarter release, “Canary Yellow” and subsequent tour cycle, Toby pumped the brakes on studio production and returned to the home recording of their many demo releases, especially the incredible “Premium Drifter”. The new album, “Metta World Peace“ (Cercle Social Records) delivers professional sound recordings without the studio trickery. It delivers the excellent songcraft, introspective lyrical content, and cathartic “ugly crying“ I often engage in when listening to them. Finally, it delivers on something Toby had said on my podcast about post punk with trap beats and underground legends in hip-hop intermingling with the Soft Kill sound. On one of the record’s standout tracks, “Paranoid”, the notorious “Horrorcore” emcee and producer, Evil Pimp (of Krucifix Klan) delivers an unforgettable feature. My current favorite song on the decidedly brief album, Veil Of Pain, also contains a feature of a different stripe with N8NOFACE… who has also dropped a wildly varied album with “Reconfiguration” (SinCara Records).
Finally, as the smoke clears and those around me began to return to business as usual, I find myself somehow stained by it all. I find it increasingly difficult to simply accept that “everything will work itself out.” These mildly catastrophic events just keep occurring. A virus here, a flood there, fires everywhere, and I’m left with unerring sense that nothing will ever be “alright.” Not ever. Thankfully, there is a soundtrack to my despair. It’s always been there. This month has had some toxic elements, but it also withheld the youthful pleasures of seeing both of the “Gothfathers”, The Cure & the Sisters of Mercy.
I’m closing, I am reckoning with the fact that the world has been coming to an end since it was first hurled into existence. Thermodynamics dictate that the universe lacks order and predictability. Entropy. All systems are certain to fail in time. So long as we have the proper mixtape, we can dance into the ashes together, celebrating the inevitable, and singing along to its obsidian verses.
A Samuel L. Bronkowitz Production