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".