Words by Andrew Lampela
Andrew Lampela was an employee and eventual co-owner of the 40-year old institution, Haffa’s Records in Athens, Ohio, just outside of the dark woods from which Skeletonwitch emerged. Over his years there he has played in a number of bands ranging from rock to noise to metal and has taken his lifelong knowledge of music into contributing to a number of publications.
It’s that feeling like when you’re with your friends. A social situation yes, but not so social it feels like anybody else is there but friends. Comfortable enough everybody is loose, worries about work and life and money and if the profoundly dense fog of disillusionment will ever lift and the NBA finals temporarily melt away as each of you bask in the friendships that surround you. That feeling when, amidst the camaraderie and joy, someone sets you up so perfectly, so harmoniously, to crack a joke that not only works to softly roast them to pieces, but also has the ultimate callback to an even earlier burn session. Bringing the group full circle, but the funnel of jokes from your absolutely hilarious brain to your mouth just…
Clogs, and you either stand there, slack-jawed and drooling, or say the dumbest combination of words uttered on Earth, betraying the very idea of comedic timing as you enjoy your own turn at getting positively roasted.
That’s what doing things has felt like lately. Except it isn’t jokes clogging the funnel. It’s America unfailingly picking the wrong fork in the road a hundred times a day with a Kennedy at the wheel (historically not great). And it isn’t basking in friendship, it’s cycling frantically through the countless hobbies that used to be joys, hoping there’s still one or two that haven’t been leaned on so crushingly hard for so fucking long now that the FOMO of watching reels of dumb people being dumb people on purpose for ten hours won’t win out every single day. Comedic timing? That’s insomnia, coffee, and tinnitus twitching for space in the washed-out loop of late middle age.
I can visualize every benefit of focusing on creative outlets. Hear every argument for spending my time in ways that will allow me to burn off slivers of nervous energy. But disconnecting from the warm, numbing glow of constantly refreshing societal collapse is one of the hardest vices I’ve tried to quit. Smoking gets dirty looks most anywhere these days, but it’s pretty fucking weird to see people not lost somewhere in the sauce of their algorithms in public. Everyone is focusing on some sweeping act for the government to slide into facism, when it only took twenty years of having every option imaginable in our pockets to desensitize billions of people into scrolling through real time genocides with a shrug.
Creativity – whether you’re participating or enjoy the work of others – should be a tiny oasis. The brain’s time to engage in a moment for the pleasure of being somewhere else. Luckily, even the most diligent of listeners can’t possibly scratch the surface of the vast recorded history of music. I’m an open vessel in my older years, as stoked on mid-1900s Brazilian Country and Rude Boy jams as I am ripping Nuclear Assault and Voivod. With so many microcosms still left to absorb, I have no fear of becoming stagnant in my own musical pursuits. Art is meant to show us new perspectives, opening new space for personal expression to evolve.
Writing, however, isn’t afforded such luxury. Getting lost in Pompeii with headphones at obscene volume is as easy as locking the front door and laying on the floor in the dark (goddamn that new LP sounds good). Sending a column out into the internet involves other people. And look, I’m not naive enough to think this will reach beyond a friend group that has already heard my bullshit before – but this has always seemed like a good place to actually try to say something. It hasn’t always worked, and lord knows we’ve all grown exponentially as the last decade ages us beyond our years every time we blink, but it has certainly allowed me to approach writing from a different perspective.
And that’s part of where the disconnect happens. How does one approach anecdotal musings about how stupid the world is when the world won’t stop escalating just how stupid it is? It has become increasingly more difficult to not politicize every word. Go to my job every morning to put beer into cans? Political. Bitch about my allergies? Political. The world not only turning a blind eye, but helping fund the bombing of starving children? Motherfucking political. Finding the worth in adding to the din has been the biggest hurdle. There are hundreds of better, more informed writers and contributing to a landscape littered with unqualified talking head opinions is hard to reconcile with the idea that maybe we’d all be better off if the blanketing white noise of content disappeared for a little while.
As I watch the illiterate hubris of these ghoulish pricks living out the Reaganite wet dream of scorching education to the ground, I remind myself that the universe took a wild turn somewhere in the mid-2010s and nothing is real anymore. I never in a million years thought I would live to see the day that the very idea of a public education system for children would whip people into a frothing wave of fear and hatred. I bet even the CIA, kings of the coup, are bowing in awe of how effectively fast an unlimited data plan detached Americans from reality enough to turn on things like Science, and Education, and… Canada? What a time to be alive.
By this point, it’s safe to say our brains are incapable of suppressing violence as a sport built upon wealth-based class warfare and racism. So much so we’ve succumbed to a system of government where two parties banter back and forth about problems that – with our ample resources – shouldn’t exist while single-mindedly fucking the rest of us out of breathable air, drinkable water, survivable weather.
It would normally be around this point in the rambling I’d try to land a joke. Like maybe one about teachers, unburdened from the struggle to help the youth of America open their minds to different perspectives in a meaningful way, can finally stop teaching about those old played out fuddy-duddies and get to some of the lesser-knowns that have tangible relevance with current events. Like Leo Baekeland inventing Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, unleashing Art Deco upon the world and who I blame for the micro-plastics in my balls, as well as the constantly-at-the-edge-of-my-conscious knowledge that a plastic bag beat us to the bottom of the ocean. Or maybe Nathaniel Wyeth, who took the idea further, creating the single use plastic beverage bottle. Nathaniel’s creation lead to a trash mass so large and firmly established it has its own biosphere and is responsible for the constantly-on-the-edge-of-my-conscious knowledge that we have fucked things up so hard that remote islands now have plastic/rock hybrids. Or Leon Levine, a man so blessed with the foresight to predict the need for a place to disperse the infinitely mountainous piles of plastic trinkets, it was surely his destiny to come up with a truly hellish American fever dream that is Family Dollar, the cockroach of food deserts coast to coast.
But that’s not how it’s going. Jokes aren’t coming so easy as Christian Nationalism has been allowed to flourish at all levels, from local school boards to the White House. And if it’s one thing that sucks the humor out of the room, it’s a cult destroying your furniture as they call the cops on you for telling them to stop.
I didn’t grow up religious. I was allowed to listen to Slayer and read Heinlein and watch Aliens. I was allowed to learn the government was out to get me and how goofy it was to believe in both a benevolent yet vengeful Burl Ives in the sky as it was to believe in whatever Venom was talking about. The gospels of Korgüll The Exterminator were my bible, every bit as relevant as a book rewritten hundreds of times over two thousand years by countless authors during periods of unfettered access to psychedelics and no foundational science to disprove gibberish. A burning bush talked to you with the voice of God? Yeah, I’ve done too many mushrooms too, bud.
The physical scars of class war aren’t difficult to follow. Waterways ravaged by industrial pollution, mountaintops razed for coal, the crumbling bones of discarded infrastructure left to bleach where they stand. COVID isolation has exacerbated an underlying psychic scar that hasn’t always been so easy to see, however, and the tsunami of spittle-flecked, uneducated diatribes from mirror-shade wearing sycophants in their car on a lunch break has slipped from goofy to unhinged. The disconnect is staggering. The same people vehemently condemning the spectre of “illegals” don’t seem to understand how this all works. Breathlessly hurling malicious epithets as the Trans community comes for their sports while live tweeting everything they loved about this season of RuPaul’s Drag Race gets you called a dumb piece of shit in this house, I’ll tell you what.
I fear America has let the genie out of the bottle, in a wave so incomprehensibly massive we may never know the true depths of how fucked this all is. There are no myths in Christian Nationalism, no parables of kindness or tenets of compassion, only virulently hateful misreadings of an already questionable work of fiction, a system of misogyny, racism and xenophobia that has so fractured America’s psyche that we may well be cooked for real this time. Render a few generations bereft of educational opportunities and they can’t poke holes in the faulty basis of imaginary mandates. It’s easy to push the idea of rich, white Exceptionalism if ninety percent of history isn’t taught. Even easier to strip rights when most of the population doesn’t have a clue how governments actually function. Everything’s true when you don’t know how anything works.
It’s just… it would be cool to sit down to one of these columns as reminisce about my godawful teenage tastes in Thrash. Or how, because I’m old as shit, I saw all the cool 90s bands. Or how it blows my mind that cassettes made a comeback instead of every word coming back around to the cloud of guilt and shame that we have learned nothing from our history. A species caught in a destructive loop of crumbling empires. I’ll be honest, I thought those “I Vote Giant Meteor” yard signs were kinda stupid, but I’ve grown into the sentiment whole-heartedly.
All I’m saying is, it would be irresponsible of me not to use the platforms that are afforded to me to call out these facist dickbags. Christian Nationalism has so splintered the nation’s core, they’ve created a world rapidly untethering itself from facts and laws and consequences and truth. One in which feeding kids a school lunch is out of the question but putting them to work because of racism is just another day of the old legislatin’.
I don’t give a shit what church you visit or who you pray to. You enjoy the communal connection of congregation, I’ll bang out nine minute psych jams with my buds. There’s room for different means of worship. My friends cover the spectrum, and they all seem just as pissed as I am how wrecked things are. I truly believe most Christians want the same as me. A world where children aren’t starved before they’re bombed and healthcare without cripplingly insurmountable debt and attainable education to save themselves from America’s arrogance.
The country is at a crossroads, and because politics has been broken for some time now, there has been no infrastructure work done to either fork. I never thought I’d live out those dystopian Sci-Fi books I devoured in High School, but as the Republican Party implements the short-sighted, destructive vision they’ve been chasing since the first B-list celebrity took office in the 80s, here we are. I’ll scream it from the mountaintops, Christian Nationalism is a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic farce of a religion determined to absolutely shred the very fabric of Truth and Justice. It can – in its entirety – get fucked. With voicing support for a free Palestine perilously close to being made illegal, how long before they target “I Cum Blood”? I can give or take the Barnes version, but if you guys get my Corpsegrinder-freaks-out-security reel taken away, I won’t really have time to retaliate as we’re all rounded up into work camps.
I guess this is just a long-winded way to get to the point, that I haven’t been able to find a way around politicizing every waking moment. So sorry for that. But as I watch these ghoulish dumbasses tear the whole thing apart, now isn’t the time for silence.
Pelican, man. They’re one of those bands you kind of take for granted, like there are albums I like better than others but there certainly aren’t any duds in there. I really enjoyed the Adrift single from last year, but held off on listening to the pre-release singles from Flickering Resonance (Run for Cover). Pelican don’t make concept albums, but all of their records have distinct feels and I’d rather get the immersive experience of a start to finish first listen. I know, nerd shit. Whoo boy, am I glad I waited. This is the OG line-up’s first album together since 2009, and I was not prepared for how much this would hit me. I love me some Dallas era Asschapel, but there’s an organic telepathy going on here harkening back to those chunky first albums that is undeniable. “Gulch” and “Cascading Crescent” should stay in the setlist until they retire. The production is thick, warm and tangible, and gives an edge of cocksure Classic Rock swagger to the pummeling. I’ll be honest, this has already cemented itself as my favorite Pelican. That might wear off when I ease up on crushing it three times a day, but I doubt it. Everything that makes Pelican, somehow even better. Cannot recommend this enough.
I’m behind the times, but I’ll join the chorus of praise for Ancient Death’s Ego Dissolution (Profound Lore). It continuously blows my mind how much quality Death Metal keeps dropping. Gimme all of it, but every once in a while, an album like Ego Dissolution comes along and reminds me just how much depth there is to still explore in the genre. If you haven’t already checked this out, I won’t ruin any of the surprises, but this album is as soaringly beautiful as it is progressively bludgeoning. It’s a brisk-but-dense thirty five minutes I’d gladly take more of. Not a bum note on this one, can’t imagine another Death Metal album knocking this one off the podium this year. Absolutely killer.
That’s not to say Corpus Offal’s self-titled debut didn’t come close. 20 Buck Spin doesn’t fuck around when it comes to Death Metal, and those Cerebral Rot tapes are some of my faves. Rising from the Rot’s ashes, we get this awesomely disgusting slab of down-tuned filthy Death Metal. Very into it.
Always difficult to pin down favorites on a Lo-Pan record, but getting clobbered by the thunderous “Ozmandyus” into the mathy, roiling “Rogue Wave” into the epic “Harper’s Ferry” is a career run. Get Well Soon’s (Magnetic Eye) production aims for the arena rafters, and if there is justice left in this dumpster fire of a world, this album will get them there. This record sounds huge.
Not necessarily metal, but I think we can all get down with some French D-Beat. I absolutely love the last Bombardement record, it’s one of my go to comfort food albums, so it’s a no-brainer that I love Dans La Fournaise (Symphony Of Destruction). I don’t know that it will usurp La Futur Est Là, as it has gotten about a thousand more plays, but I love this shit, so who knows.
Sometimes you need the comfort food albums. I had very high hopes that a clutch of OG Melodic Death Metal bands would provide me some mental escape, but they were all pretty meh, so I shall sing the praises of Relentless Force (Redefining Darkness), Vicious Blade‘s ripper from last year. Jagged thrashy First Wave worship that absolutely nails it for twenty seven minutes. I’ve been leaning on this record for a long while now, and it fucking delivers every time. Relentless Thrash with Crossover-inflected mosh riffs and killer vocals. Man, it doesn’t get much more satisfying to me than Relentless Force. (Also worth checking their contribution to Faster Than The Devil II as they share space with Blasted Heath, and we all know how I feel about Blasted Heath)
If this were back in the day, Kiritsis would bridge the gap nicely between my Nailbomb and Unsane tapes. Certainly a Sludgier affair than either of those, Kiritsis (Wise Blood / Pout Records) gives me all the same cathartic fist-swinging release. This will appeal to a large swath of Metal listeners, from Crowbar to Godflesh, and it’s becoming a staple in the rotation. Killer album.
Decrepisy mix equal parts Doom and Death Metal into something uniquely oppressive on Deific Mourning (Carbonized Records), a record I find myself returning to quite often. It’s an atonal affair, and the misery is palpable, but it’s a cohesive atonal misery with more nuance than you would expect. Diggin’ it.
In Metal adjacent realms, Speedway put out an absolutely perfect twenty minutes of Hardcore in A Life’s Refrain (Revelation). I like the mosh-parts-only stuff too, but Speedway plays a style of melodic Hardcore that drops me back in the 90s, and I love that shit. Short, concise songs with tons of parts and the best Rock And Roll solos you are likely to hear on a Hardcore album this year, I have been absolutely crushing this thing. So good.