Finally getting around to posting more from our trip last fall to the Outer Banks, North Carolina. (While also finally getting around to posting anything at all….)
(Some weird things happening here due to the circular polarizer….and user error….)
….quite a departure from what you may have come to expect from SSfS, but I was taking a little trip down memory lane and had to share.
This is what I was listening to in high school and into my numerous failed attempts to do the college thing. In the dark times known as The Eighties and the even darker Nineties.
Still to this day one of my all-time favorite bands.
Really, it’s mostly the rhythm section. Two brothers whose blood clearly crosses from drums to bass and back again. I have never heard two tighter players.
Ok, it’s the lyrics too.
“Critic Martin Popoff described their music as “the mightiest merger between the hateful aggression of punk and the discipline of heavy metal.”Nomeansno’s distinct hardcore punk sound, complex instrumentation, and dark, “savagely intelligent” lyrics inspired subsequent musicians. They are often considered foundational in the punk jazz and post-hardcore movements, and have been cited as a formative influence on the math rock and emo genres.” — (from Wikipedia)
Yes, “savagely intelligent”.
Technically incomparable, even if it’s not your cup of tea. Hopefully you can appreciate it regardless. I’m not personally a big polka fan but I think I could appreciate a really great polka band. So these guys are kinda like that.
Give it a listen. At least to the 6 minute mark but preferably all the way to the end. (Or if you want to skip directly to that technically-incomparable-same-wavelength-brother-drummer-bassist part go straight to the 29:27 mark.)
Plug it in. Press play. Go on about your day.
But Do it loudly.
Tell your neighbors to….well….you know….(strong language warning)…
Most of these songs are from the album Wrong which is pure genius beginning to end.
Have a Hardcore Sunday–
“To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.”
—August Rodin
~~~ Because I am trying to write “statues” and “stature” keeps taking its place, the weight of it becomes a thing that grips my head, falls from my mouth, splits the page open and tries to find a hammer there with more weight than I can put into the words because none of these words are heavy enough and the book has become the boy, alone in my lap, and I can not comfort him and I can not touch him or hold him upright, or take the mask of blood from his beautiful face and so he dies there, on the page, far from me and the leaves turn and they blow across his face and I do not feel them and I do not see him and I am not beautiful like he is and I do not think that I could ever be that beautiful and I do not even know what that means and I do not know that I have ever known the real cost of being a body that desires and I can not see the beauty in the mask that he is made to wear or in the dance that he is made to perform or in the words that he is made to speak or in the price that he is made to pay. ~ Rodin also said, “The human body is first and foremost a mirror to the soul and its greatest beauty comes from that.” What do we see now in the mirror? Our beauty? I have only this empty book, lying here, closed and heavy upon my lap. ~~~ (after Richie Hofmann's "Book of Statues")
(This week marks the twenty-first anniversary of the beating and murder of Mathew Shepard) (The photo is a detail of Rodin's sculpture, "Despair", in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum)
A Prayer Like Gravity 