Noise Pollution #8: Troubled Sleep
I’d found myself in a relationship that I probably shouldn’t have, mostly because it was easy and I was at the end of my rope. That dragged on for a few years, eventually to the point she actually had to introduce me to her family and, since mine were a few states away, meant I would spend holidays with them. Inevitably this meant there were gifts exchanged, the usual tradition of the season. This fascinating look into how I became the villain in yet another woman’s life isn’t (just for) therapy, it also gets us to this column’s destination, so hold tight. One of her brothers was actually somewhat thoughtful, and he realized that we did have some common ground musically, so one Christmas he bought me two records he thought I might enjoy; The Swarm‘s Parasitic Skies and Cursed‘s I. Generally his tastes were far less aggressive, but he’d become accustomed to curating to someone’s tastes, mostly because he also managed the record store I was working at, though a few years prior and probably much more jovially than I did. I gave them a spin later and was instantly hooked.
He told me he really wanted to give me Cursed II as popular opinion (him and his friend’s girlfriend) dictated that it was the best of the bunch, but the vinyl was out of print then. Cursed would become a band I was actually excited about, something I would want to talk to customers at the record store when they brought them up. The more I got to talking to people, the more I realized that the first two were highly celebrated, but the third album, III: Architects of Troubled Sleep, was spoken about as being almost “too raw” and caustic. So, the hunt was on. I wasn’t a huge proponent of using sites like eBay or Amazon or even fucking Discogs, the one site specifically for this activity, to hunt down a record I wanted. There was something about finding something in the wild that appealed to me. Fortunately I didn’t have to look too hard. I was at our store on the Ocean City boardwalk during the off season digging through shit and cleaning up when I found a box of CDs that time forgot, including Mind Eraser’s excellent Glacial Reign and a ratty copy of III.
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Yes, I understand the irony of talking about how I avoided digital means of finding (or listening) to this record while posting a Youtube link on a website that is multi-layered, and I’m glad to be here to share it with all of you.
III: Architects of Troubled Sleep has everything I loved already about the band, but wrapped tightly in a layer of razor wire distortion and delivered at gunshot velocity. Outside of its sonic proximity to black metal, something I would come to love in certain hardcore bands, Chris Colohan’s lyrics and delivery became the focal point of my experience with Cursed. Of course, possessing the timing of premature ejaculation I had missed Cursed as an active and live band by a few years, even though there were occasional reunions there hadn’t been any real signs of life or new recordings, leaving a small but visceral body of work. Later that summer, Krieg was invited to play the Something Bloody Fest in Providence and I once again found myself in Armageddon Shop, this time holding the Blackout at Sunrise EP.
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Recorded in between II and III, this EP shows a more restrained yet malevolent side of Cursed. On their full lengths it felt as though they wanted to physically hurt you whereas Blackout at Sunrise feels more as if they wanted to terrify and emotionally batter you. It would become a toss up between this EP and III being their record that I’ve listened to the most in the years since. Both figured heavily into the writing process for Krieg’s Transient album going into 2014, but another Colohan spearheaded project would bookend that year for me and helped get me through a pretty shit time.
We’ve woken up to better days, but we’ll live through worse…
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Burning Love is one of those rare instances where you take someone from one band you really enjoyed and put them into another formation that you get just as much out of. More of a punk n’roll band ala Ass Cobra-era Turbonegro (without the graphic sex or drug subtext) Burning Love’s Rotten Thing to Say would end up being one of the last records I grabbed from the record store before I was fired. While obviously not as aurally assaulting as Cursed, this was a band that spoke to me as I was stuck with $40 to my name, a half tank of gas, and no real (decent) employment opportunities. Songs about misery and futility while overcoming the absurdity of existence were the type of fuel I needed before my girlfriend’s (the same one whose brother figures in the beginning of this exciting tale) mother hired me to clean medical facilities that treated prostate cancer and other diseases of the penis. 2014 was a roller coaster year.
Please clap that I decided against saying it was a “hard” year.
So where does that leave us now? Burning Love hasn’t released anything since 2015. All has been quiet on the Cursed front. Colohan has spent the last few years fronting Sect, an HM2 powerhouse akin to other greats like All Pigs Must Die, but I’m not as familiar with them as I’m going to eventually be. What I wanted to end this one with is my favorite demo that was released last year, Oxygen Tank‘s Demo 2021, which features Colohan alongside Morgan Carpenter (of Hive and an equally impressive roster of previous bands) performing a mixture of early Rollins-era Black Flag mixed with Cursed and Hive. Short and fierce hardcore songs that manage, at under ten minutes in total, to make a bigger impact than any other punk recording last year. I’m ravenously excited to see where this goes.
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So like every good record or band or musician, Chris Colohan and Cursed/Burning Love made a massive mark on the last decade of my life, and that’s my general motivation for Noise Pollution; a vehicle for stories surrounding the soundtracks of my experiences. So, thanks for sticking around this long and I’ll see you back in another two weeks.
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