Xerxes - Myth and Poetry

My love,

It has been years since we've last corresponded.

I still see you in my dreams.

The first dream was of a spectral, pale vision of your former self. Three months ago. You moved closer to me in the darkness and I felt the cold aura of a white ghost. You told me 'perhaps I have died'.

I awoke screaming, in the middle of the night. My room, a room I had taken great pains to sanctify and protect from the reach of sinister forces, it now felt empty of air, my walls freezing to the touch. Evil was in my room, I could feel it. The promise of your death had robbed me of my vitality and precious wisdom. I lay shivering in my bed like a child, lost to the world and lost to your light.

I pulled out every cantrip and minor miracle I had learned in my 33 years, I prayed to the Goddess and chanted evocations, I called to Athena to destroy your enemies, I prodded the eldest serpent in the bottom of your ocean fault to shift, to move, to disperse these aspersions of your sanctity. You are the Goddess. You are the priestess. Can the priestess die?

I triangulated the source of my numerous infections, in this weak moment startlingly clear to me and their bodies towered over me in my small London room, suffocating me with their mad cry of nihil. If you are dead then so am I. Perhaps I have never existed.

A bad moon, an ugly moon I thought I would never again have to think of again towered in the sky. It's been a hundred years, it's been a thousand years, my love. The mistress made her perennial demand: holocaust. I can not shoulder this burden as I once thought I could and this is why I first reached out to you, after this first dream, for answers or even just a word.

I wrote to you with a plea of re-connection and a secret desire of re-cognition. If I have spoken ill of you, I apologize. If I evangelized your death, I apologize a thousand times. If I made love to a corpse of a memory while I pretended to simply dissect it, for this hypocrisy and hubris I will apologize forever. Forever.

Please believe me.




Months later, you came to me in a second dream.

Your presence was foretold and I didn't believe it. The priestess will arrive, you just have to be patient, I was told by other wandering shadows. I knew the place and I knew the time and still I didn't believe. I am so sorry, I feel so small. A small thing that nonetheless, exists. You have your mercy.

A small thing looks up to you and at once, now, sees you, as you did come. Your eyes were silver with prescience, your face, a face I hadn't been able to re-collect for 7 years was more beautiful than my heart can bear and... I was ashamed.

I looked aside, like a bumbling teenager, I had no words, I pretended to be one of the other wandering shadows, to bask indirectly in your light like a tired serpent on a stone. I was nothing in that moment, but it only lasted a lifetime. My ossified corpse still remembered training, and wisdom and truth: truth is always liquid, liquid re-sanguinated this corpse. I simply couldn't stand still, I had to turn to you, again, my love. This training you imparted, and this wisdom I conquered in this and other lives.

I turned my head, again, to you, all my little courage to look into the wound.

You ran to me and embraced me.

You kissed me on my lips.

You whispered to me two things:

"I am alive, you big dummy" and then,

"Hold me tighter".


I am so sorry. I repent for everything. My love for you is eternal, and so you will never die. Your myth is mine, and so, my poetry is yours. I know you don't belong to me, anymore, if you ever did. I know that every living being feels the same love for you that I do. I know the Creator of this world, even he in his madness and cruelty, he writes his poetry to you. God's own erotic poetry, it is everywhere around me. We all bend our knee to you with gratitude and longing. The dreams that we dreamed of, awake, alone and silent in the dark.


I woke up from this second dream to my little, warm room in London, with renewed, crystal remembrance of what love is and what obligation is. My freedom is found in your servitude. I turned on a computer and checked an e-mail account and you had written back to me. I was a fool but I am a fool no longer.


Xerxes were a 90's progressive metal band. They put out two records and disappeared. They sound like nobody else and near-nobody cares about them now or even remembers them. Nobody? NOBODY?

Archives have weight and all that, I have been crushed under the weight of my own archive - we've been over this. But poetry is not an archive, it is an act of love. Poetry on the page is weightless, it is levitating, it is like the butterflies that flutter in the hollow inside of a human body, as it is probed by the silver string of pathos.

This is the solution to our particular conundrum. The name of the blog solves itself. I'm not afraid to write to you about an old Swiss band that means this much to me.

Xerxes have a little bit of Watchtower in them, a little bit of Psychotic Waltz, perhaps, yada yada yada. They don't have a domineering vocalist and that's probably why they vanished into obscurity, or perhaps people confused their innocence for lightness. Heavy metal has to be heavy, right? Regardless of whatever lack it was that damned Xerxes into obscurity, what they do have is heart and a message and absolutely no fucking distance between them. Can you say the same for your creative pursuits, dear reader? Have you dissolved all the distance between the bleeding stone inside you, from which flow a thousand secret streams of romance, and the bullshit that comes out of your mouth? I didn't think so.

It's alright, hey, neither have I! But Xerxes achieved this, and so they must never be forgotten. Let me help you help me help Xerxes never be forgotten, not through an addendum to a self-important archive, but through poetry and myth.


Let's do this in this way. Chances are you haven't heard this shit before, so here you go, the internet provides, or at least NOW it does, not 20 years ago when self-important little metalheads had to write to Hellion mailorder to get cds and vinyl in the mail and then carry big boxes home as if they were treasures the extracted from a horde of a dragon - aren't all these old-metalhead nostalgic ballads disgusting? This is a better world. Just click on a youtube link to listen to the first of the two offerings by Xerxes:




Read while you listen, then perhaps listen without reading, you know what to do. I trust you, regardless of your first impressions with this music, to never forget Xerxes.


Here's why many people do not even recognize this as metal music, though it definitely is, and instead call it prog-rock of some sort. There's not even a little bit of what Xerxes do (especially in their debut that you're listening to now) that is not borne out of a pure desire to capture and portray beauty. There's no evil and no violence to these songs, there's only absolute, otherworldly, ethereal motion and playful, expressionist movement. It's hard to listen to 'Beyond Your Imagination' and not imagine a wandering through field and forest of pastoral, resonant calm. There's stories to these songs, fairy-tales, moral paradigms, but it is the setting that is the star of the show.

Where is any other metal music that proudly exclaims to be beyond usual imaginations of metal boundaries and themes? Where is any other metal music not trapped within a suffocating box of its own nihilist masculinity? Where is any other metal music that transports the mind in an a-temporal realm of pure wanting?

It's impossible to feel nostalgia of a tangible, bygone moment in one's life, when listening to Xerxes. The point of this music, the pure quintessential distillation of it is that it evokes a desire to return to a fantastic place that we've never visited, but yet exists.

This is the poetry I want to write about Xerxes, this is my obligation to you, this is the thing that has changed in the long trek through this subcultural examination and all my scattered musings lead to it, in-advertently, in-exorably: that place exists. It exists Beyond Our Imagination as we stand now, but it exists and our imagination can lead us there, if we try. It is a disservice to our love and our freedom-in-servitude to be the solipsist, the rationalist, the relativist and chalk up this feeling that you feel as you listen to Xerxes, perhaps for the first time (oh, how I envy you, how I love you for it) to an invocation of a nostalgia of a place that doesn't exist and then return to a reality that does exist. If you have gone Beyond Your (once capped) Imagination, why would you choose to forget where you went and return to a basest stricture?

Our lives are not floating in a meaningless void, we are anchored by a commonality of hope and desire. I know your hopes and desires, you know mine. You always knew. Xerxes provide a sketch, to the best of their ability, with disarming earnestness, of that place we all know but because of life being so hard, we often choose to forget. A levitating castle in the sky, a forest in the mists, a river that runs down the mountain, through the fields and up the same mountain, again. Eternal. Contemplate eternity!

In the heart of this realm is the same old stone, we all know it, its bleeding horror and thousand inspirations. They are not all beautifull, but they're real, as real as your dumb computer screen shooting electrons in your eyeballs.

As such, in that place, this real place, we will never die.



The music of Xerxes is filled with playful twists and turns, democratically partitioned between two guitar players and a host of keyboard orchestrations that have symphonic ambitions. The historical lineage of NWOBHM to techno-thrash riffery to proto-progressive to the realized conclusion of metal-band-as-orchestra can be traced by those with a kink for metal history. We've talked about this stuff before, right? You know all of this. You can understand Xerxes just fine.

And you can be kind to a vocalist of limited means and big ambitions. Did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to listen to actual orchestras, conducted by actual geniuses, so far away from you they might as well be alien beings visiting this world? Or did you get into heavy metal because you wanted to hear what simple people like you and I, of limited means and talent, can do when they devote their soul to this big ambition of describing in poetry and song, That Place?

Good answer.




The first album by Xerxes ends in this declaration, in all its English-as-a-Second-Language-Heavy-Metal-as-the-First beauty:


"All you poets of this world, you have been honored by the Grace.
Writing in the manner you wish, gliding out of this Earthly realm.
Raise your voice again and again. They should announce us as messengers.
Catch the world of phantasm and bring it over here, with which we want to align.

Our desire is to defeat the bluntness, to save the highest aim.
We do not want to comply any longer with this interminable, senseless game.
Raise your voices again and again and create new poems, fairy-tales and songs.
All you poets of this world."

It's okay to cry.





The first album did nothing, it made no splash, nobody bought it or listened to it besides a few prog metal nerds, and here we are. But it's fair to understand why Xerxes themselves might have been wounded that their pure-heart offering did not receive an enthusiastic welcome by the '90s metal scene.

What would you do, friend? You would disband, of course. Or you'd start playing Pantera power groove with keyboard solos on top like Dream Theater. You'd have become bitter and cynical. You'd have chased musical competencies that are recognized by the wider professional world. Whatever.

What did Xerxes do? They self-funded and self-released an even better, more ambitious, more multifaceted, more carefully constructed, more beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful offering to the same feeling, That Same Place, they didn't give up and they didn't believe your lies that you didn't recognize what they're singing about. They looked at you straight in the eyes, from the darkness their obscurity had damned them to, and they smiled kindly.

And perhaps a bit wickedly, as their second offering is darker.

After crossing the threshold with "Beyond Your Imagination", Xerxes were wounded in the battle with infamy, and they emerge on "Falling Leaves" (consider the autumnal theme) as warrior-poets, not just bards. This record is devoutly metal, the minstrel folk of the debut has been minimized. Here the melancholy of a bygone reality reigns paramount. This is the dark middle chapter of a trilogy that wasn't to be and it's a tragedy that it wasn't, as far as I'm concerned. There's no red "split up" in metal-archives that saddens me as much as the one in Xerxes's entry. It's sad because it was we that were pushing Xerxes into the darkness.

"Wait! Wait. I have so much more to tell you." calls the warrior poet in the cerulean mists.

I stress this, friend. Where Xerxes are taking us is a reality. Not fantasy. Reality. The Place is real and you must also do your best to eradicate your distance. We've talked about what tools to use and we've talked about what art is on this blog for a long time. Help me help you help Xerxes. Don't be a jerk.

The twists and turns of the material are no longer playful and innocent. They are dramatic in full consideration, and the sharpness of the violence of nihility rears its head, as it is to be battled. The devil must visit all of us in the desert.

"Nowhere in this world
I can find a refuge
Silent and dark is my love
Doesn't make any sense
Or is it too late?"

But Xerxes will remind you of the terror as they reminded you of the hope of sentience. The blood flows from the stone in the heart of the kingdom. Pretend you don't understand, pretend until you drown in your own cynical abjection and wordly rationality. Pretend that you can make it through this life without love and freedom. Xerxes will have none of it, they cannot bear to tell a lie.

Xerxes will never tell you any lies.

Fall under their spell and never forget them. This is art borne from kindness and its minor cruelties are because kindness has to be a cruelty sometimes, if it is to spark remembrance. They did this for the betterment of all humanity. They made zero money for it, they have no peer accolades to show for it. A hundred people across the globe listened and loved them and remembered. I am one of them. It was by chance but it wasn't an accident.

Wouldn't it be a beautiful thing for you if you loved and remembered them too?

If you found them naive on their debut that naivete is of the Fool on the start of his Tarot journey. Xerxes reflected on this, and "Falling Leaves" finds the Hanged Man in mid-stride, levitating, upside-down. He will take on all colours if he is to reach The World. All the hyperbolic death-obsessed death and black metal that you use as a poison salve for a misunderstood wound, Xerxes are aware, awake and in full knowledge that the wound is beautiful and they will guide you through it, for 37 minutes, once 37 minutes, twice, to lead to, well... you know where.

Pay attention to the track "Sam Hain". In whispers and premonitions it is the key. The debut failed (insofar that a masterpiece can be called a failure) because it did not acknowledge their own shadow, perhaps. All of the beautiful heritage of Fates Warning, Watchtower, Psychotic Waltz, all of the technology this strange of music developed in its multifaceted ambitions, it is all employed for a singular concern here: Meet your Shadow Self. Step right through your Shadow Form. Come out the other side. You are reminded of something right now, and your memory does not steer you wrong. Many people have tried to tell you the same thing in different ways. They weren't lying. Xerxes will tell you no lies.

Sam Hain in the middle has no lyrics. It has instrumental force that goes through a lot of contrasting motion. Keep your focus. You can use your mind to see the images. Step through the shadow. Nobody said it would be easy. In the middle you may feel that the World seems to be dead. That all color sadly dissipates. That for all your faith, you are left in the night sea, drifting.

But in the distance you will see a bridge,

floating

Secrecy

Running down the memories

Wrapped up in desire

Oh, where to start. Where to begin.

Was it when you rejected me? Was it when you told me lies? No, before that, before anything. Was it when I realized I am alone, that I'm not an appendix to mother/father? Was it when I was born?




In the early '90s Heavy Metal had gone through three formal transformations. It went from a grassroots, do-it-yourself movement in the UK, inspired by (and often interchanged with) punk to an integrated marketing item during the glam/thrash years and finally it tried to negotiate (with itself, within itself) what it means to be successful and what it will mean for now, towards the future, when the eye of the public will move on to the new trend. What will Heavy Metal be now that it can no longer be innocent?

Because that is what it was in the early '80s, it was spontaneous and more than a little bit silly. Guys with bad guitars and drums and bad voices cutting a 7 inch vinyl record about the Castle of Some Wizard. Let's say that was the period of a little boy playing with their toys alone.

Let's then say that success in the mid to late '80s is mother/father finally taking note of the elaborate constructions, dioramas and vistas their gifted-if-a-little-weird child has created in solitude. Acknowledgement and function warp the form. The difference between a toy and a game is that the toy has a masturbatory function. A game is to be won or lost, instead.

And Heavy Metal lost. How could it not? Mother/father demanded too much. The potency inside the little boy's reconfigured toys was ambiguous by subconscious design, disaligned with Reason and Truth. Mother/father demanded that the insane pathos therein be transformed somehow in an understandable patron design, to be reproduced and enjoyed by adults that live in the Real World, only, responsibly so, perhaps on the weekends, perhaps on a rowdy night out, then back to the office.

Heavy Metal became a fully formalist pursuit circa 1990, with the gravestone being - of course - Metallica's Black Album. Finally, a Heavy Metal record that a marketing executive could enjoy without feeling bad about themselves.

So the teenager Heavy Metal, at the time, tried to appease mother/father. But then they had a second child (grunge and indie rock, whatever you want to call it) and *they* were illogical and impulsive and their toys where ambiguous again and mother/father had a new problem child to solve.

Heavy Metal entered its most volatile, disgruntled teenage phase. It said FUCK YOU MOM/DAD, but it didn't really mean it. It went back to playing with its toys, but when it thought nobody was watching, it took hidden glances towards what mother/father were up to, hoping they were looking back. Not too much, but at least once in a while, to let him know if the grown-up world was outraged/pleased with how the game was shaping up. Either could do.



1. In the '90s, Heavy Metal tried to kill itself to live forever. A norwegian young adult was murdered by another. Churches were burnt down. To assuage the gods, the ablation will be blood. Boys and their toys, oh what will they do for mother/father to pay attention to them again? It's very boring being a teenager, you know.

2. In the '90s, Heavy Metal also tried to stop being Heavy Metal. It tried to become Something Else Metal. Atmospheric metal with gothic touches, industrial noises and new-romantic pop frilly shirts. Or Progressive metal, modernist, abstract, ambiguous like a cubist painting, fey and fleeting. Hang me in a museum.

There was never a time where Heavy Metal overextended itself so much as during the '90s. Toys became games, games became enterprises, big dreams were crushed and unexpected success came for many that had hoped for self-destruction instead.




There was a German band, once, called Secrecy. They started out as a thrash band, like a great many others, slightly late to the party in 1987. Germany in 1987 was not a fun time, kids grew up fast, even if they wanted to play Heavy Metal. As was the paradigm for many German thrash acts of the time and place, Secrecy played a very precise and well-designed type of thrash, one possibly inspired by the then just released "And Justice For All..." by Metallica. As evidenced in Secrecy's first demo "Like Burning One's Boats", Secrecy were trying to take that techno-thrash mold and push it even further in a emotive direction. As far as I've noticed, they were the first to do so, and even now in 2013, ones of the very few to ever attempt this.

In that rapidly reforming state that Heavy Metal was in circa 1990, Secrecy very quickly shed the remnants of their thrash past and quickly assumed a fully progressive metal attire. They got signed to Noise Records, the place to be for their sort of music. They were smart people because thrash was indeed dead in 1990. If you wanted to go the savage route, you would have to play death (or if you were really forward thinking, black metal) at that time. If you wanted to pursue more human topics like those first touched upon in techno-thrash, you would have to become even more melodic, more artistic, more grown-up. Secrecy put their money in that direction.

As early as on their first record, "Art in Motion", Secrecy had created a masterpiece of modernist Heavy Metal. The band is now largely forgotten, and they have not been influential even in underground circles. There are no Secrecy clone bands, there is nobody trying to play progressive metal like this that I know of. It is worth our time to discuss why I consider their material so successful and also why then, would such a successful effort not reach a wider audience.

Secrecy's thing on their first record (and to some extent to its follow-up) is that they play very muscular, well-defined music, very rich in harmonies and with melodies that extend and complete themselves beautifully. The rhythm guitar playing here fills every verse space with sharp triplets, but takes care to open up for the choruses to breathe. When the drummer does a drum roll, the guitarists will palm mute its approximation. They always take care that even if a melody goes through unexpected directions it will resolve itself in a clear manner. Unlike many other progressive metal bands, they are not complicated for complication's sake. There's very little formal abstraction in this music - I can envisage it performed by a string quartet or small orchestra without major alterations. Sure, there is aggression - in fact I would say that on the first demo and on a few cuts from the debut they reach proper thrash metal band levels of push. But even their aggressive parts are always considered as means to create contrast with their more emotive melodic themes. Now, this was a new thing for Heavy Metal.  Take Watchtower, techno-thrash and progressive metal stalwarts. Their music was much busier than Secrecy's, and it was, for the most part, always so. There were dynamics, but usually the contrast achieved (and desired) was one between abstract, fluid chromatic solos over bright clean guitar arpeggios and then, their full-on, compact, over-composed, every instrument independent, on the brink of collapse style that made them notorious. Watchtower were not an emotional band. Secrecy were very much about conveying emotions and they used the shell of thrash and Heavy Metal to do so.

Could then Secrecy then best be understood as a post-thrash band? I do not think so. I think a staple of post- anything bands is that they appropriate surface formal characteristics of the music they're about to turn inside out, and then they create art that is dialectically opposed to the function of the original music. So far, so good, that's exactly what Secrecy are doing. But here's the problem: post-x music cannot be appreciated as an object belonging to x genre de rigueur.  SunnO))) appropriate black metal tropes and can be seen as a post-metal endeavour, but they cannot be enjoyed as a black metal band. There's simply not enough there, there's only surface textural characteristics of metal (or black metal). There's no depth to the content, when looked at as metal music.

This is a common issue with post-modern art, I'm not pretending I've made a startling realization here when examining Secrecy's music. The case is that Secrecy's riffs and songs are too well constructed as thrash or Heavy Metal music to be seen as post-metal anything. In fact, were the listener to be selectively deaf to the vocals of Secrecy and a few select musical passages in their debut, they could place the record historically, in the Bay Area circa 1987 without much trouble. Anthrax were often as melodic, for example.

So if Secrecy know their Heavy Metal inside-out and they can compose 10 Accept hit songs in their sleep (I am not exaggerating, this is the caliber of the composers in Secrecy) then we have to beg the question. Why are they juxtaposing harsh, muscular thrash edge with this meek, teenager voice and why is their lyrical subject matter so decidedly teenaged?

The answer I've come up with is actually pretty simple and that's a big part of why I think it's the correct one. Secrecy were playing a gambit. They looked at Heavy Metal circa 1990 and they tried to think which of the then nascent 'exit-points' would become the most popular. Would it be romantic, nationalistic and often reactionary returns to blood, guts and sorcery? Or would it be humanist, modernist Heavy Metal-for-every-thinking-being? Secrecy thought the latter, bless their hearts, and set out to create one possible patron of that ideal.

This isn't to say that they did not believe in that direction, I don't think it was a calculated, cynical affair. I would bet that Secrecy - or at least the chief lyricist, pulling the rest of an uncertain band along? - really believed in themselves in all of this.

The lyrical material on Secrecy's debut is not well-written. This further mystifies subject matter that is ambiguous to begin. What I've gathered - and perhaps most importantly the function I use it for, the type of emotion I want to have when I listen to them - is that Secrecy are recounting the various existential wounds of teenager and young adult life. There's a real sense of hurt to this music. An accusatory tone that turns outward and inward at the drop of a dime. It is remarkably successful how just keywords, and the singer's singing voice are capable to evoke such an emotional response in me. In the past I've rambled about one of my first failed love affairs while Secrecy played (I will not reproduce the text as it is in Greek) and I just can't help but summon those uncomfortable feelings of alienation, loneliness and mistrust of my own teenager experience when I listen to them.

It's extremely potent to put these feelings not on top of some mope rock or gothic pastiche, but instead over crystallized Heavy Metal power. It is not just a good tool of vengeance, it is life-affirming. Secrecy take the shittiest parts of being a teenager, the shittiest part of being under the thumb of mother/father, or that of the school system, or being pressured this or that way by your peer group and they place it on top of a towering artifice, kaleidoscopic in its beauty and seemingly eternal. It will stand upright forever, and the most tender and wounded part of a child's heart will be there, on the top, for all to see. Defiant and beautiful. No Secret.



Secrecy were wrong, we know now. They succeeded completely in creating the avatar of emotional, warm, complex, prickly on the surface yet still tender-hearted Heavy Metal. Their songs are a joy to listen to purely on a 'whee, Heavy Metal!' fun way. But they're very deep and thoroughly composed. The voice employed is the voice of someone's childhood. It is so brave to put this voice, singing these words, on top of their quasi-thrash. It is, in fact, too revealing of their intentions. I can imagine a rowdy, denim and leather clad beer-guzzling hesher saying "turn that shit off" if you played them Secrecy, because it would make them uncomfortable. Secrecy are uncomfortable to idiot metalheads exactly how a homosexual person would be uncomfortable in their midsts. Playing Prostitute Disfigurement for them, that would be fine, it wouldn't make them uncomfortable at all. But Secrecy? A fey teenager girl voice whining on top of muscular, compact and composed thrash? Filth, just filth.

This is the triumph of Secrecy, that you have to confront a soft attack. You have to learn something about yourself to understand them. You might find yourself lacking. There's no two ways about Secrecy. If you like Heavy Metal, it's impossible not to like their SONGS. If you're trapped in some perpetual masculine performance, it's imposible to like their tone and their message. Secrecy will let you know that. They have truly taken a thesis, an antithesis, and structured a synthesis out of the parts - how Marxist of them. There is such internal tension in Secrecy's music but there is no disagreement in it. It is What It Is. A remarkable achievement.

I bet people couldn't stand them - I bet they ran as fast as they could back to their Destructions and Sodoms, to their comfortable fantasy escape, to the occultating mists of mysticism. Back to their toys. Eyeing mother/father, are they paying attention? What use is Heavy Metal if it illuminates the most tender core of the teenager heart?

Well, a lot of use, it turns out, now in 2013, that Heavy Metal is spent and over, now that it is a civil war reenactment, now that there are a million bands whose sole raison d'etre is 'to be one of a million bands'. I look at Secrecy's brief two-album trajectory and I am humbled by what is achieved in such a brief time. More than that, I am inspired.  The clarity of intent, the musicality of the songs, the emotional capacity of the awkwardly written, yes, lyrics. I want there to be more of this type of Heavy Metal, because it is most needed than ever before, unlike, oh, 99% of the other, oversaturated metal genres. The tender heart still beats because how could it not? History has ended, capitalism has won, but injustice is still here, injustice is still experienced daily, the wound is there. How will we address it?

Naturally, on their second record, "Raging Romance", Secrecy have an answer. They are mostly preoccupied with their faith in God. Did you ever doubt that this would be the end-point of their story? Angsty teenagers against everyone, rebelling against Reason and Logic as much as they were to nonsensical posture and bravado in the metal scene, what would be left to them but the ultimate alienation of their peer group? Christianity it is, then.

There have been many "white metal" bands over the years, many of them playing to their home crowd (christian communities that liked the form of Heavy Metal but detested its message, easy to market to, right?) but there has been no other band like Secrecy, who used finding-God as the ultimate punchline against everything that Heavy Metal stood for, and did it with such panache. As you would expect, there was no third record.

The band is rumored to be back together again, and unlike most reunions, I am half-looking forward to another record by them in 2013. If there's a band that can push forward from their past glories and become vital, upsetting and offer something new in 2013, it's Secrecy. But it's equally possible that they will be trapped by self-conscious issues, their 'legacy' as a band, and create "Raging Romance pt. 2". It would be such a shame, as the music would be good, I bet - nay, stellar, possibly - but it can't be about God. Not in 2013. I refuse to believe that the tender heart of Secrecy resonates to the calling of God. It can either be charred and withered by now, 45 to 50 years old, conservative and slavish to authority, or it has to have forsaken the lord, it has to be irreverent, impossible, brighter than the sun.

Deathrow - Deception Ignored

Noise Records, 1988

Milo: Vocals, Bass
Sven Flügge: Guitars
Uwe Osterlehner: Guitars
Markus Hahn: Drums



Deathrow were a German thrash metal band. Their first couple of records are exactly what those interested in thrash minutia expect from German thrash metal. While the Bay Area scene created the genre through a merging of the melodic sensibilities of the British New Wave of the early '80s with the urgency and severity of hardcore punk, German initiators seemed much more obsessed with the latter half of the equation: Speed, raging savagery, an emphasis on non-sense in song structure an atmosphere of pervading dread. From that common well (sometimes referred to as 'speed metal') there came not only Sodom and Kreator, but bands that morphed quickly to different shapes, like Running Wild and Blind Guardian. The problem with calling it speed metal is not so much that it's outmoded (so are 'atmospheric metal' and 'techno-thrash' and I endorse both) but that not a lot of people seem to agree what a speed metal record is. That's never good for a definition in aesthetics. They all agree it has to be fast, but hell, half of metal music is played super fast. I have this curious feeling that what they mean is that speed metal is metal that is *only* fast and not much else of interest or important is happening in there. Anyway, for historical reasons it's useful to remember that once, there was such a thing as speed metal even if nobody exactly agreed where the lines were drawn between it and power metal and thrash metal. If you're into history. You big nerd.

But for now let's just call that German stuff thrash. Sloppy, raging evil thrash.

Although Sodom and Kreator were sloppy (Destruction, the most American sounding of their original German thrash bands, not so much), with each record they became more strict in playing and showy in technique. This is interesting because the other rival school for savage thrash metal - that of South America - really did not follow the same path, they're still drenched in reverberated chaos over there, in fact compared to a few of the Blasphemy clones in Brazil, their grandfathers in Sarcophago were veritable virtuosos just by keeping in tempo.

I theorize that the reason German savage thrash became more and more reigned in and technical with each release by the seminal bands is that the German culture is one that rewards a sense of structure and cohesion (even in atrocity), and it discourages blatant displays of emotion in art that cannot be backed up by some aesthetic achievement.

So Deathrow on their first couple of records play really fast, relatively tight but really forgettable German thrash metal. Then they grow up. There are others who enjoy juvenile raging thrash more that consider that early material to be masterful and their latter two records (the better of which we are discussing here) to be a pose and false. I understand that point of view and agree on both counts. In fact, the band also agrees to an extent. It is both a pose and false of Deathrow to switch to techno-thrash after two Sodomite records. They never grew up at all! They're just teeeenagerrssss


So as far as I know what happened was, a new guitarist, Uwe Osterlehner, joined the band and basically took over by virtue of compositional and playing prowess. Perhaps the band trusted him because techno-thrash was on its brief heyday by 1988, what with Metallica putting out their Watchtower-inspired "And Justice for All..." a year earlier and introducing many a headbanger to rhythm syncopated, an unresolved melody and a sixtyfourth. Osterlehner's songs were more technical than Metallica's effort, the rest of the band struggled to keep up. The riffs are very strictly played, alternating between the muted-chord chug of German thrash and flowing legato melodies that come from somewhere left-field. There are a lot of interesting harmonizations offered by the guitar duo, while the rhythm section barely keeps up with the density. At their best, Deathrow sound almost symphonic. And then they return to thrash monophonic and the switch is very affecting.


The original members of the band, in interviews have explained that the situation was sour and that they prefer the earlier thrash-thrash material to the modernist convolution of "Deception Ignored" and (to a lesser extent) its follow-up, "Life Beyond". But - and I know this is perverse - I view Deathrow as a vehicle for Osterlehner first. I have no emotional ties to their earlier thrash (though I had bought their sophomore 'Raging Steel' on vinyl at the time and remember having a good time with it) and perhaps more importantly, that inner strife of the band at the time actually augments the sterility and austere feeling "Deception Ignored". The band can whine all they want that an externality pressed them to create a masterpiece, the music itself is forever.


Techno-thrash is very interesting because its concern is the human condition, much like with any modernist art. However actual modernists were almost always attached to a political wave, they recognized allies in the lower classes and expected well, they expected a revolution. They believed their art was a herald to it, in fact. Some urged for smaller revolutions than others, but they all were forward-looking people. Heavy Metal music dealing with modernist themes has a blatant difference at its core in that very rarely does it sincerely profess that the solution to any problem is found in the 'We'. Instead bands such as Deathrow or Sieges Even or Megace, discuss the hopelessness of the 'I', trapped in a world of modern machination. In essence, modernist Heavy Metal like techno-thrash and progressive metal is not really primarily political.


Heavy Metal bands by 1988 were not the domain of the working class. The disaffected youth that played thrash metal were middle-class and their issues are of the middle class. The disaffected youth that played techno-thrash probably went to University too. It's very clear in the lyric found herein what the level of discourse is. Let's look at the lyric of the best song here, Machinery:

I am walking through the streets
Of my old town
Looking back on the days
Of my youth
There are factories in the fields
Where we used to play
Clouds of smoke hang in the sky
And block out the sun

God bless this house, the car and the TV
Show us our idols in magazines
They build us prisons without any walls
Money rules we can't resist

Snakes of commercial TV
Decoy with their apples
False priests spit out their lies
Because God sells
If we don't pull ourselves
Out of this mud
Our children will have to pay
For our sins

We're just wheels in a great machinery

Encircled and trapped by ourselves
We're enslaved to mass productions
Self-deception from a better life
Our behavior brings corruption
We buy a pig in a poke
And we drown ourselves in the garbage

Supermarkets sell
Us their shit
We can't free ourselves
From this world of abuse

For someone to have a car and a tv and to be enraptured by money, they are being seduced by the siren song of Capitalism, they're moving upwards and outwards from their sense of self. It doesn't matter that they work in a factory or not, they do not have class identity as workers. And that's what captures my interest. The concern expressed above is one I feel completely. And I feel alone for it. I do not feel like joining the communist party. I do not feel like telling other people they should change their lives. I do not expect a revolution. I want the despair expressed, this is enough for me. That loneliness, that existential singularity is how modernist Metal is still part of the great romance of Heavy Metal itself. A revolution is an inner happening, the outside world will forever be hostile and its purpose will be to dehumanize you. That struggle of the intelligent but disconnected youth is what drives techno-thrash and also what makes this particular offering convincing. The words themselves betray a lack of political knowledge, and the pose is exposed easily if this is compared to say, a real socio-political hardcore punk record's lyric. No Marx has been read. But what is true in the core of this is what is alluring: intelligence and loneliness breed paranoia. When the most important thing you have to tell to the outside world is 'I don't trust you'. When the strength you have is yours essentially because it is not shared with others. I believe this weakness turned to strength, it is an important part of Heavy Metal. This is why whereas most of thrash is forgettable, the few techno-thrash gems I present should not be. Deathrow here, actually a little bit ahead of the curve, have created one of the best offerings in the genre and almost nobody knows of them, they hardly seem to know themselves. As apt as it is ironic.

Anacrusis - Manic Impressions

Metal blade, 1991

Kenn Nardi - Vocals, guitars
Kevin Heidbreder - Guitars
John Emery - Bass
Chad Smith - Drums

Here's a dividing line between Heavy Metal and extreme music in general: the former is a tribute to beauty. Metal music is loud and abrasive and the subject matter is sometimes horrifying but the internal aspiration of the musicians that toil in their bedrooms to construct those baroque riff structures is that of reverence towards beauty. Effort is required, but is not indicative of beauty. A grindcore band might have to work very hard to get to the point where they are fast enough to play their material, or tight enough as a unit to make it cohere, but that effort doesn't necessarily contribute towards the pursue of beauty; I may be the fastest guitarist alive but if all I find in myself to play are chromatic power chord variations on the first four frets, then I'm metaphorically drawing one of Pollock's action paintings, let's say.


There isn't only one beauty, much the opposite. But there is, and can be detected in the work of many artists, the personal intent to reach ones vision of beauty, or ones vision of ugliness. The art world has been concerned with this divide for the last fifty years. Post-modern theory applied to the visual arts for example, dictated that the pursue for beauty in the modern world is best left to illustrators and marketers that shall employ their skills to make pretty shit to dress ugly shit to sell to consumers. Real artists, was the modern decree, should look beyond surface beauty and invariably, to inner ugliness. On this command, if you'd care to visit an art gallery you'll see much modern & strikingly ugly monument to strikingly ugly & modern living.

A recent semi-movement towards a return to beauty has been brewing in art scenes around the world. They argue that the pursuit of natural beauty - and the skills to achieve their representation - are not throwaway and shouldn't be defaulted as commercial by use of marketers. They want to get pictures of beautiful people, landscapes and scenes back in the art galleries. The merit of both sides of the argument is debatable, I only bring it up to make a parallel with Heavy Metal's history.


Metal music has been straddling the middle space between modern art and ancient art since its inception. As a cultural movement it is resolutely modern and could not have happened in any other climate. Just the concept of young disaffected youth picking up costly electric musical instruments, recording in high-tech studios to put out vinyl that is to be distributed around the world, it is easy to see why this is a modern thing. However the high intent for the art produced was and is - as is the thesis of this website - mostly romantic, looking towards beauty and tragedy. Romance is anti-modern. Its concerns are not phased by the solipsism of knowlessness that has afflicted us of late, indeed it is sometimes something of a cure to it. Blood and death, passion and lust are a lexicon of a primal language, for whom do they not resonate?

So we have then the curious case of 'cyber cave men'. Expressing something ancient and eternal with the tools and methods of a future that not only has no use for instinctual imperative, primordial lust and romance, but resolutely pretends that these things do not exist, they never existed. Internal tensions, combustion, self-destruction. The curators of modernity mock the earnestness with which metalheads reach, ill-equipped as they are, for the grace of god, yet at the same time they're intrigued by their fervor.


A lot of confusion between listeners of metal music comes then, by their focus on either the modernist or the romanticist aspects of it. Many listeners are taken with the high concept of metal and approach its modern guise as a necessary evil. These people usually do not care for their metal to be super-well produced and cutting edge, they like idiosyncrasy and a bit of rustic autism in the sound design. They're interested in the ancient feeling inside the riff structures, the entity that is summoned.

However other metalheads prefer their metal-product to betray its modern world trappings primarily and consider its romanticist conceit as a vestigial leftover. "Metal bands sing about dragons, whatever. But check out that double bass!". This latter type of listener is interested in metal foremost because of its sonic impact, the gut level physiological reaction to audio battery. The pain, they figure, is similar. The ugliness is similar. They've known it before. They listen to a lot of metal as they listen to a lot of extreme music, because that is the sound of the modern world and it taps into something ugly inside, an undeniable reaction to the ugly outside.


Though I fall mostly in the former archetype as I grow older, I do remember, and can appreciate the latter type of fascination with ugly, harsh sound. I do not condemn the Other for being false, I seek to merely highlight the lexicon through which we may come to communication and understanding over our differences. Metal music, as I've said before, belongs to everyone. However Heavy Metal is in my heart and I wish to communicate its many graces with the outside world, I wish to entertain existence through effect.



The ugly in metal music has always come from punk rock. The influence of that on metal is undeniable and deep. The modern structures that spread the New Wave of British Heavy Metal far and wide are rooted on the do-it-yourself punk ethos. Without the punk renaissance, Heavy Metal would have been a dalliance of rock acts that would have ended in the late '70's. But with the impulse to get your friends and cut a gnarly seven-inch validated by the punk experiment, comes the baggage of ugliness. Cheap and commodified is the modern world, and so shall be its art. Contrast this "four ugly dudes cut a gnarly seven-inch" process with the fantasy of the high art wizard, carefully structuring his art in his ivory tower, investors and patrons knocking on his door constantly, begging, imploring the art wizard to choose them as his financial backing. They promise the world for the beauty the wizard is privately concocting. Heavy metal has this progressive rock fantasy of how art works in its mind, but at the same time is impatient, it's going to cut that seven-inch right now and the investors will come later, right? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. The young wizards now older and cynical, retreat to the underground. They still speak of beauty but they remember the ugliness too. History married with modernity. The past marred by the future.

Thrash metal was one of America's interpretations of this gruff & pimpled, young & old, New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Power/speed metal was the other, and hair metal was another yet. A country of shallow history, with ties to the old world that it feels ambivalent about, is excited and inspired to make their own beautiful and ugly metal. Much is made in underground circles of the US Power/Speed metal sound. Some of my favorite albums come from this substrand of American metal, certainly. In listening to them through the lens presented by this article, it is easy to see what the appeal of it is. As an American reinterpretation of something European, it is a 'trash culture' take on romance. If Black Sabbath sounded baroque and horrifying, if Rainbow sounded arch and lush, then Jag Panzer sound pulpy sci-fi, hysterical, bi-polar, savant geniuses. American metalheads, shameful for their lack of deep history chose to amp up metal in a different way, play more riffs, make more complicated songs, throw in more extravagant solos, sing higher than ever before. The lyrical material takes a back seat. Sure it's still fantasy, but where Dio sings of wizards and their fantastical towers, Jag Panzer shall sing of post apocalyptic gangs clashing for street dominance. Feel the spikes in my baseball bat. Ugliness found a back door to metal and through clandestine passages, comes to the forefront.

US Power/Speed metal is fascinating for its combustible mixture of ancient romance and American consumer culture ugliness. Slauter Xstroyes sing of their 'need to survive' yet wear quasi-kabuki face paint and road warrior shoulder pads on stage. Thrash metal, US Power and Speed's younger cousin, has a slightly different mixture of the same. Eschewing romance almost completely (only approaching it through second-degree pulp novel affections) it instead hones in on a critique of modern living much like American punk rock did, though unlike it, from the vantage of the lone individual. Hardcore Punk approached Marxist ideology and communality mostly as a shocking mechanism for middle America, but metal music was shocking enough without the great red ghost, so it did without.

The trajectory of thrash metal can be seen on the rise of Metallica. On their first record "Kill 'em All", Metallica sing of metalheads, partying, bringing the metal to you, phantom lords, leather and chains, banging your head against the stage 'till metal takes its place. Then they start to see success and the world is looking at them. On their second record, Metallica sing of capital punishment, of ensuing nuclear holocaust, of feeling dejected and on the fringe of culture. Modernism and humanism have entered metal in full force. Write us an essay, Heavy Metal, tell us about world hunger.

Everyone would take a page from Metallica after their success. So many thrash metal bands concerned with real-life topics and with a very punk rock 'street cred' pretension to their image would spring up. It's tempting to call this material metal only in sound design and punk in thematics, but the truth is more complicated. And here let's talk about Anacrusis, and their 1991 release, 'Manic Impressions'.



Anacrusis formed late in 1986 and they went through the usual trajectory of 'Judas Priest is awesome!... oh wait, what the hell is this Metallica band doing?' that typifies the thrash boom, only in fast-forward. By 1988 they had their debut, 'Suffering Hour' which is an extremely competent thrash record. But by 1988, thrash metal was already played out, its strength diluted by the many Metallica followers that latched on the formula. As the underground was concocting its new, death metal sound, many thrash metal bands - now inspired by Metallica inspired by Watchtower - went in the far edge of modernism, making their sound less visceral and headbangable and more cerebral, cold and intellectual. Techno-thrash came into brief prominence. Anacrusis made their jump towards this vague sub-category of metal with their second album, aptly titled "Reason", and perfected their take on their third, and subject of this examination, "Manic Impressions".


The sound of Anacrusis here is fascinating. The rhythm guitars have their middle frequencies scooped extensively, and the distortion tone is very jagged and sharp. This sound identity makes the guitar melodies distinctive, but overall low in the mix. Drums and bass dominate and offer propulsion with the usual thrash graces of polka beats and Slayeresque sixteenth tom rolls. The vocals alternate between a reverberated moan, perhaps reminiscent of goth punk outfits of the time, and a serrated, inhuman scream that cuts through the mix. The complete thing sounds sterile and curiously - for a thrash record - empty. Anacrusis main man Kenn Nardi would later seek to amend this by remixing the record in his privacy in 2006. What he did was raise the guitar levels some, re-equalize them and apply a lot of signal compression on the whole mix. I theorize he thought this is a better sound for the record as it fits the modern metal archetype. However his new mix is very destructive in its compression and contributes to nothing but ear fatigue for the listener that is very familiar with the material from its original pressing. As such, whereas I will not disregard the impulse for the remix (in fact, I consider it very important and telling, as I'll explain below), I will be drawing from my experience with the original mix.

The material here is mostly fast paced, with lots of choppy stop-starts, changes of theme and harmonic derivations. Anacrusis retain their raging thrash edge from their earlier approach, but increasingly a melancholic aspect is brought to the front by the use of chorused and reverberated clean guitars. The juxtaposition is very relevant to the lyrical themes at hand. Anacrusis here deal almost exclusively with feelings of despondency, guilt, the burden of existence, the search of something real. These thematics are the full truth of modern ugliness. If there ever was a type of metal that captures modernism, techno-thrash is certainly it.

Modern extreme music listeners, especially coming from a hardcore punk or metalcore background, are probably very familiar with the idea of a band playing raging extreme music, their singer screaming his lungs off about lyrical matter that is very oblique, inexact, personal, existential and morose. Anacrusis were at the forefront of what only retroactively can be seen as an improvised movement that introduced this type of approach to thrash metal in the start of the 90's. The fascinating thing here is that - unlike a lot of metalcore - the end mixture of sterile thrash, melancholic interludes with moaned and screamed vocals over tremendous teenage guilt achieves a synergy that is very potent. The difference is one of class and subtlety.

Anacrusis have captured on this record, the sound of teenage rebellion, self-doubt and indeed, the irony of early resignation, young men feeling like they're two hundred years old. There isn't much hope to be found in the lyrics of this record. Even in the follow-up to this, "Screams and Whispers", the only hopeful note on the whole thing is the question mark that serves as its bookend. Yet, there is something here that is hidden, something that redeems the angst and pain.


This must have been a difficult album to make in 1991, where metal was still concerned either with appearing tough and macho to outsiders to alienate them, or scrambling for something high-brow to say to appear intelligent for them. Here's a band that had shown considerable capacity for metalhead-pleasing savagery on their debut, putting aside that approach for bearing their personal baggage. This might be old hat in extreme music today but I'm sure the response to Anacrusis at the time was not encouraging. I believe it is exactly because of those embarrassing memories that Anacrusis would choose to remix this record to make it sound tougher for today's climate. I am thinking of a young Kurt Cobain at the brink of world-wide success, still trying to get his close friend to score steroids for him so as to improve his weakling frame. That feeling never goes away. Taking my volume knob away from my won't make it go away either.


This record should sound exactly as it sounds. Spacious as a young empty soul, a void of paranoia, let down by religion, by institution and society. The story here is in the riffs. These riffs, composed so meticulously, harmonized in discordant parallels that mock traditional orchestration, alternated between compact muted linears and delicate vertical arpeggios, here is the cure to the ills of Anacrusis, in full display, can you see it? Heavy metal, even the most punk-infused versions of it like thrash metal, still retains its romantic heart in how riffs and structures are meticulously constructed to point to something higher. Anacrusis here have no words of hope for us, but they have music. Towering monuments, metallic scaffolding that pushes through the modern atmosphere and onto weightlessness and void. Where one is left alone, where there is nowhere to go but inside. There are no answers, but at least now there is a space, an insulated space in which to work it out, completely alone. This is the most fascinating thing about Anacrusis, that they summon not an entity with answers and ideology, but a space in which the useless nothing of modern society, the introverted teenager, is allowed to stretch a wingspan they didn't know they had. To be given back what one always possessed, that is what Heavy Metal is. Romance is a language, but even in lack of language, the broken, battered, beating heart of Heavy Metal beats the same. In the machinery, the clash of deterministic gears with free-willed steel. Look at the blood-red sparks, here is your beauty.



Let's listen to one of the tracks on this album closely. The aesthetic choices here are rife with ambiguous space on which to assign personal meaning. This interaction makes this record intimate, pushing aside the jagged shards of personality that inspired it. I chose the song "Still Black" because it speaks to me the most but the morphological notes here apply to the whole of the album. There is no filler.


0:00 - 0:11 : Tuned a fret low, Anacrusis introduce the main theme of the song, which is chromatic. Sixth, Augmented fifth, perfect fifth, diminished fifth, this is the sound of direction-less anxiety. There is no third to paint this sad or hopeful, there is no movement forwards or backwards. The by then customary thrash frill of punctuating the start of each bar before coming in in unison is upset on bar two, the phrase left to stand on its own. Doesn't it sound weak, almost comical with the hollow sound design, on some level? Now think of when you were a teenager, locked in an argument with figures of authority, how shrill and powerless you sounded.

0:20 - This is that voice, coupled with the second guitar harmonizing the stacked diminished fifths, the sound has more power but sounds askew. Combustion, propulsion, impulse, but no certainty, where will this take us?

0:21 - Stop-start, a heartbeat's worth of breath, and the lyric comes:

"My touch means nothing
It's just a sympathetic mock embrace
This pity for you leaves nothing
But a bitter taste
Persistent lies, nothing
But useless words of waste

Your voice seems harmless through
These softened tones of grey

But grey is still black"


Remember when you were young and compromise, middle-ground and half-measures seemed so alien and confusing? How 'good enough' was still bad? The way 'grey is still black' is voiced by Anacrusis here rings true to me, every time.

On the second verse, as irritation rises, the last word of each line is screamed, voice cracking.

"Your face is nothing
But a transparent fixture
Perception is nothing
But a distorted picture
Expectations are taking in
The deceptive mixture

Your substance is nothing
But a lightened shade of grey

But grey is still black "

Here is the guilt. Perception is nothing, nobody is right, we all hope but we all fear, and it doesn't stop hurting.

1:21 Note how melancholic it sounds, the verse of

"A carousel of vanity
Apparently persuading me
Still all the while evading me
Accepting all, believing none
Always pretending we are one
So meaningless"

Being played on top of thrash metal gallops and palm-muted riffs. The theater of metal is falling apart, the gleam of virtual armor is betraying the human flesh inside. Note how the vocal comes in and out of the mix - no doubt due to bad recording at the time, but how apt it is. This isn't something to fix in a remaster.

1:39 As 'so meaningless' is called - and here is the startling beauty of it all - the most refined and complex theme of the song is introduced, it unfolds like a flower and in

2:03 the form dissipates into the liquid arpeggio of the mangled power chord that is the spine of the song. Polka beat harshly punctuates. Listen to how little there is left to the song at this point, beautiful fragility. Of course Anacrusis are glorifying emotional distress here, but this is at least, turning pain into a tool, using it to put oneself back together.

"Intentions mean nothing,
It's only for the one inside
Regression prevented,
Carried on the truthless tide
Cold breath, mistaken,
Whispers with a senseless pride

Your front is nothing,
Nothing but misted cloud of grey

But grey is still black "

Note how at the labored vocalization of 'grey' that marks the beginning of the chorus, stop-starts are employed with a degree of triumph, as if the argument is coming to a head and at least the argument is dynamic, vital, it arrives to an emotional externalization. This point is made again and again on this record, when the right words are finally let out, the music stops to commemorate.

4:09 Note the wonderful switch-up under the melody. The polka beat went from snare first to kick first, propelling the return of the fragile theme towards a subtly different emotional end. I tend to feel snare first polka beat as battery, violence, a series of body strikes, whereas kick first feels for me like someone moving - away or towards - something. Something positive has come from this argument after all. Hidden beauty, hidden hope.

I am not advocating that Kenn Nardi and the rest of Anacrusis composed this piece of music with these clear conscious signifiers in mind. I think instead that a lot of great art is understood in the analysis of the subconsciousness of the artist, as betrayed in the art object. It is not imperative for these aesthetic intuitions I present to be validated by the artist or by the public at large. That they are inspired, that the music makes me feel and think and try to put these two things together, is enough.

And after all this a guitar lead is allowed to comment on the main themes of the song. It is melancholic but active, searching for different accents and punctuations to the arguments at hand. It holds a high note for its exit, an idea that lingers, the original idea restated in a final verse and chorus repeat, vocals more savage than ever, words are fading, only the emotion remains.

On 5:42 - a moaned, distended scream. Gray is still black.