some "content" about an album from a Canadian death and thrash band

Besieged returns twelve years later

The engine is flooded with death metal and thrash, and because of that you can smell Violence Beyond All Reason. The new album from Besieged burns from track one with blink-and-you-miss-it atonal solos, spitfire chord changes, barking vocals and guitars, and hyper-driven drums.

“Paragons Of Brutality” opens with drum fills that fall into a groove before slam-dancing from riff to riff. This sound is part of the legacy of the classic Florida-based band, Death. The old way’s piss-stain spread shows darker on “Path to Defy,” where the band tries to piece together pit-bull bites. And drums first lead the attack and then hold back on “Descent into Despotism.”

Powder-flecked riffs spill from pockets and socks, and left turns blur into oncoming traffic.

Besieged started around 2010 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Twelve years somehow passed between the band’s debut, Victims Beyond All Help, and now. The sound is a mix of progenitor Death and Bay-area thrash. The songs sometimes lack flow, and the drums can sound canned as the mix buries the bass and cymbals, but the guitar is a self-cutter and this album is wild.

Unspeakable Axe Records releases Violence Beyond All Reason June 6, 2022.

 

something about lending support

The woman opened the package—the Ukraine flag had arrived from Amazon. She remembered ordering it on Saturday or Sunday and was grateful that she had not picked the big one, having chosen instead the tasteful 18"x27". She still had to find a place for it outside.

The blue and yellow colors were pure and signaled to neighbors that she is informed and feels passionately about the issues—that she, too, stood with the people of Ukraine.

Some weeks later, returning from her walk, the woman paused and counted three other Ukraine flags on her block. How long, she wondered, do we keep these up?

something about “Revolutionary Road” by Richard Yates

American author Richard Yates gives voice to friends of loneliness. He made an extraordinary debut in 1961 with Revolutionary Road. The novel’s aching pulse beats loudly, softens, then redoubles louder than before. Characters struggle to make sense of the feeling that they will never live the life they imagined. Yates once said, "If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy."

Revolutionary Road plays out in East Coast suburbia, 1955. Frank and April Wheeler think they are in a rut. Frank, a charismatic intellectual in his college years, no longer finds ironic amusement in the nine-to-five workaday office life; April, an attractive, artistically inclined woman, is home with the kids and a growing sense of desperation. April persuades Frank to relocate their young family to Paris, where the promise of real life now awaits. This promise of change gives new spark to their relationship—but the spark dissolves in a thread of smoke.

One dampening force is the neighbor’s adult son, whose borderline personality and candidly delivered, jaded insight depicts the Wheeler's problems plainly. Then April discovers she is pregnant, conceiving reckonings. The desperation buried in the Wheeler’s unsatisfied lives surfaces for air, and change comes.

Yates once described Revolutionary Road’s subtext:

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the 1950s. Because during the fifties, there was a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.

This quote surprises me in a way, though, because Yates sounds like he is criticizing people like Frank Wheeler because he could not leave the security of the suburban life and office job; but in reading Revolutionary Road, I thought Yates was criticizing Frank because he thought he deserved anything else.

Notes:

• Quotes from Boston Review, October 1999, and Ploughshares, Winter 1972.
• Revolutionary Road, the 2008 movie directed by Sam Mendes, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, but Michael Shannon owns it, of course, with his performance.
• Previous posts: something about Richard Yates and something about "The Easter Parade" by Richard Yates