Skip to main content

Rampancy - Coming Insurrection

 

2013 was a weird year. The US Government gave up on holding anyone accountable for the 2008 financial crash and the home loan scandal, Americans shrugged their shoulders at rampant drone strikes on civilians, Republicans tried to rig an election in a major city and suffered no consequences, right wing terrorist attacks reached a level where they joined mass shootings, extrajudicial police killings of marginalized people, and endless foreign war as mere background noise to the American experience, and the whole country kind of woke up to the fact that running an entire political party on HOPE sorts of ends up with a NO WE CAN'T feeling.

Somehow, I don't remember exactly how, an album by a Canadian band called Anti-Freeze crossed my path. Lo-Fi, harsh, raw, angry as fuck. A perfect soundtrack to the collapse many could smell on the air but wasn't quite on top of us yet. A second and third album followed, chronicling the continuing slide of America from idiotic HOPE to simmering fascism through the end of 2016.

Fast forward four years. I left the US to raise my kids in a safer saner place, Anti-Freeze fell off the map in a renaming and reworking spasm, and life flowed on. I lost touch with a lot of the ways I found out about new records five years ago, and lazily began to rely on Bandcamp to put things in front of me to look at. I suppose it worked out, because here is a new Ant-Freeze (now Rampancy) album for me to look at.

The sound has moved on a bit from the absolute raw lo-fi rage of the Aftermath EP and it's immediately following LPs. There is more synth now, and more Noise influences. But it is still a righteously angry record - the kind so necessary now. Now when no one has learned the lessons or heeded the warnings of 2013-2020. Now when fascist rhetoric and white supremacist insurrection have joined the other background sounds to the collapse of the new Rome. Now when the pathetic spectacle of convicting one of only 7 pigs brought to trail for the 15,000+ extrajudicial killings since 2013 is seen as a great moment for justice and proof that "the system is working".


Labels:
Location: London, ON, Canada

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Agriculture - Agriculture

  a   While calling themselves ''ecstatic" black metal, Agriculture traipses along the line between atmo-black and blackgaze pretty adroitly. I am not as head over heels as some of the metal press I have been reading about them (like Rolling Stone for instance), but I think they have a good thing going here. They remind me of Vattnet Viskar sort of, and I am going to withhold judgement until I can see them live to really decide.  That said, this is an album that has been in heavy rotation at my house since its release. Agriculture by Agriculture
Post a Comment
Read more

葬尸湖 (Zuriaake) - 孤雁 (Gu Yan)

 The thing I continue to love about this album, now five years after it came out, is how unabashedly Chinese it is. For me, there is nothing quite so nice as taking something from somewhere else and adapting it to your particular circumstance, whether it be food, music, or whatever else. The world is filled with terrible Nordic imitators, so I am always really stoked to see bands who lean in hard to their local scene / culture / roots. This is probably one of the albums that really sent me down that path, and I will always be indebted to Zuriaake for that. Gu Yan is an epic, sprawling, even cinematic, album, and should appeal to fans of bands like Wolves in the Throne Room and Primordial . Musically, there are serious elements of Summoning here, but most of this album is utterly unique to Zuriaake and the atmosphere they build is entirely their own. Traditional instruments back up the backbone of the sound, not as a gimmick, but as the bedrock on which the whole edifice rests. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dødsferd - Skotos

  Raw atmospheric black metal it it's sun soaked Mediterranean best. Wait... That's not right. Oh, but it is. For 20 years, Greece has been the home of Dødsferd since it's beginning as a one-man side project. Now, 10 albums, as many splits and EPs, and five comps, two new songs are available. Packaged with a re-release of the landmark album 'Diseased Remnants of a Dying World', what you have here is the pinnacle of what raw atmo-black can be. A full LP of this would easily be Album of the Year. I can still hope right? Skotos (Atmospheric Black Metal) by DØDSFERD (Greece)
Post a Comment
Read more