Noise Pollution #34: Lewd Wishes Won’t Change

I’ve spent a lot of time this year so far being either emotionally empty or overwhelmingly distraught. While this has been fabulous for my waistline as I haven’t really eaten over the last few weeks since I had Covid it means that my mental health drugs are having to work unpaid overtime and, much like an Amazon warehouse, they are not allowed piss breaks. 

I start therapy in a few days, so there’s that I suppose.

Anyway I bring this up not out of any kind of attempt for pity sex or to drive mental health awareness or a combination of the two but because it’s really influenced a lot of my listening habits since Christmas, veering out of black metal and back around into hardcore, a genre I haven’t really had the itch for in some time. This was spurred on by a conversation with lawyer to the underground, Danny Katz, over what was happening in my life and he suggested I listen to Blacklisted’s “No One Deserves to Be Here More Than Me” due to the lyrical content. I obliged and dug it, but it didn’t immediately click and by then I was buried in enough miserable shit that I wasn’t paying much attention.

Then, thanks to Spotify’s almost always terrible AI DJ that I throw on during my 30 minute commute every day, “I am Weighing Me Down” from “Heavier than Heaven, Lonelier Than God” and that did the trick.

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I remembered the record from my days of exemplary service to the record buying community of Mays Landing, New Jersey, and always thought the cover was interesting but never checked it out. I guess these things just tend to be found at the time they’re most needed? That approaches something close to faith, which yeah, no. But I gave the record a full listen and was really grabbed by the lyrics, which seemed to speak to my condition(s) as well as the music just being exactly the sort of hardcore I would tend to gravitate towards. But the album closer, “Wish”, might be the closest I’ve ever heard to describing my experiences with mental illness. 

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I’ve written about the genre a few times here before, covering Cursed, The Banner and Integrity, but I haven’t had the urge to dig into hardcore to find new (to me) music in probably five or six years. I got kind of burned out with all the “blackened” hardcore that was being peddled to all of the places I wrote for, bands that just came and went. Similar to how I wandered off from black metal a few times before. Blacklisted were a band we sold a lot of shirts of, but I always equated them with the people who would buy said shirts and that was enough to turn me away. At least I have the chance to rectify that now.

Going back to that theme, I think I ended up missing out on a lot of music I might have enjoyed at the time either because of the people who bought them, or the cover art wasn’t entirely representative of the music, so I just carried on with whatever droll shit I was doing at the time, probably looking at the piles of moth eaten Tommy Dorsey records that some asshole who watched an episode of “Pawn Stars” thought was worth a fortune. I know that I did have a bit of the cliche’ record store employee attitude about things, but it was mostly from being constantly exhausted by people trying to turn their liquid shit into gold. Thanks to the magic of Youtube and Spotify’s algorithms (when they work, the fucking Spotify DJ told me this morning “Now it’s time for a vibe, and that vibe is campfire” and started playing folk music that almost caused me to run my car into a guardrail until I realized I could skip through it) I’ve had a few of these records pop up. And, like I did when I was reigniting my interest in black metal five years ago, I give every one of them a chance. One that caught me by surprise was “Black Eye Blues” by Lewd Acts. 

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“Nightcrawlers” was my introduction to them. It came across as a mixture of Cursed and, for whatever reason , Dodheimsgard to me. I understand the latter might not make sense to anyone, but like I said I’m entering therapy and this is what my brain connected it to. I kept the song on repeat for most of my drive and eventually checked out the entirety of the album. I remembered the record from the overstuffed boxes of shit we didn’t order but would get sent/charged for from Cobraside, and the cover doesn’t really equate to the music for me, but it’s not my fucking band.

The whole album from start to finish is caustic and punishing but also carries a lot of themes of dealing with one's place in the world and, I could be reading too deeply, themes of mental illness as well. There is a feeling of deep sadness throughout this record that permeates even the most burly of riffs. While these are mostly 2-3 minute long songs the album’s closer, “Nowhere to Go”, is six minutes of doomy punishment, with the last minute and change being a revisitation of the first riff on the album (from the aptly titled “Know Where To Go”) bookending the experience. The song is fucking perfection.

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I haven’t delved much into the rest of their discography, but this record, whose cover I dismissed, has turned into something that is helping me along a really rough patch. Another band that I’ve been diving into, not really related to my deteriorating emotional condition but rather just out of curiosity after really digging their “Confusion/Chaos/Misery” EP from last year is The Hope Conspiracy, a band I should have made myself more familiar with considering my love of vocalist Kevin Baker’s other band All Pigs Must Die.

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As far as the genre goes, this should not really be something I publicly admit as a “new” discovery for myself, sort of like discovering Bathory ten years after forming a black metal band. But it’s not like I’m going to somehow hurt my public image, enough of you let me know you think I’m a hack that writes stupid shit to keep me grounded there. Regardless, killer band and I’m very excited for their new full length in May. If there’s still a world left in December I’m sure I’ll be writing about it. 

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Lastly, back to the Spotify DJ who also told me that a bunch of Indian pop artists were “your (me) kind of pop” amongst trying to shove Municipal Waste into every playlist possible, played Guns Up! for me, another band I might have passed by while being told how many Beatles records some unholy reanimated abomination who stumbled into the record store to ruin my day, and it really scratched that itch for me. Very pissed off hardcore without giving off that “throw me the pass” vibe that a lot of hardcore tends to give, especially the records being recorded in the 00’s and early 10’s. 

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Also the Entombed nod about thirty seconds before the song ends is terrific. Too bad the fucking record goes for like $50. And like every band on this list save The Hope Conspiracy, they’re long gone as well.

As a challenge to the four of you still reading, take a guess which part of this was written after I started therapy. I’m strongly considering writing a Substack about the experience. Maybe I’ll get mental health writers reaching out to tell me my writing there sucks as well. As for the next one of these, I’ve got a plan for once, and it will be revisiting an old topic plus finishing the Krieg story I started in November. Excited? Me neither, see you then.