All Wolves Fed: Holy Death’s Paradice
Worship, take up serpents.
On Friday, March 7th, Long Beach mosh merchants Holy Death are releasing their new LP Paradice via aptly named No Weak Riffs. Like the nail-haloed baseball bat that adorns this and so many of their other album covers, Paradice is both blunt and sharp, leaving puncture wounds and cratered skulls in equally gory measure. Drawing immediate comparisons to LA legends Xibalba, Holy Death also call to mind those moments of mid-paced hammering on Asphyx’s Last One on Earth, the proclamatory hardcore of Terror or Hatebreed, the world-genocidal breakdowns of Weekend Nachos, and the swamp-tuned sludge of Crowbar and Eyehategod. Holy Death’s mix of death/doom, hardcore, and sludge is vicious and unfailing, made all the more potent and incisive through its inversion of holy writ and pulpit pap to condemn the very religious structures of civilization that make civilization so structurally unbearable.
“Plague Saint” begins with a short definition of Santa Muerte, which translates to “Holy Death,” before we’re greeted with the declaration that “nothing holy is free.” The song, invoking old-school death/doom with thundering cleans while creating a hellmouth mosh pit, introduces two lyrical themes of the album: “fuck my enemies” hardcore and the aforementioned inversion of religious language to serve more ominous ends. Standout track “All Wolves Fed” references holy wars, moral terrors, faded glory, esoteric morality, heaven’s disorder, and lambs for the slaughter. Binaries are everywhere—wolves/lambs, heaven/disorder, glory/failure, failure/victory, strong/weak—and they establish the key philosophy for the Paradice. This is a band working within and against the rigid, restrictive binary of a religious civilization and doing anything it can to waylay and lay waste to it. Similarly, this animates title-track “Paradice,” beginning immediately as it does with “Sacrifice—roll the dice, pay the price. Sacrifice—no cowards in Paradice.” We hear echoes of Speed here and older hardcore tropes (gambling, paying the price, sacrificing yourself for the scene, a less than generous view of cowardice), but they, too, are being if not inverted than ironized in the light of a crushing“eternal debt.” To belabor the point, this is a deceptively sharp, savvy record cloaked in the blunt-force trauma of a nailbat.
In The Future of an Illusion, one of Freud’s great later texts, he writes sardonically and lucidly about the structure of (a failing Christian European) civilization. “Everything that happens in this world is an expression of the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in the end, though its ways and byways are difficult to follow, orders everything for the best—that is, to make it enjoyable for us. Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the over-mighty and pitiless forces of nature.” This is—as Freud will spend the rest of the text arguing—illusory. And it is illusory in resonant terms with Holy Death’s project. Freud continues, “And, looking in the other direction, this view announces that the same moral laws which our civilizations have set up govern the whole universal as well, except that they are maintained by a supreme court of justice with incomparably more power and consistency.” Curiously, those rules governing our civilized world are the very same that will govern the afterlife, except that those governing the afterlife possess an incomparable power and consistency, an incomparable power and consistency that is then necessarily and functionally meant to redound on the verry supreme courts of justice making demands of us in the name of (Christian) civilization on Earth prior to death everlasting.
Ultimately, or rather, not ultimately, because nothing is ultimate in the recursiveness of Freud, “religious ideas have arisen from the same need as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushingly superior force of nature. To this a second motive was added—the urge to rectify the shortcomings of civilization which made themselves painfully felt.” What’s really at stake for Freud in The Future of an Illusion, other than attempting to denude religion of its illusory powers, is the state of civilization and its many reasons for discontent. You can also begin to see how Freud’s project and Holy Death’s Paradice are of a kind. “As above, so below / Grief takes its toll,” the band intones in “Casket Match,” another song that combines hardcore rhetoric and religious doctrine: “empty promises and violent sin.” The song itself, which sounds like Knocked Loose meets Obituary, harkens back to the weakness of flesh, seeking peace within a casket. Life is nothing but “decades of pain,” the same sort of “painfully felt” shortcomings of civilization Freud lays bare. “When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever… he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts his own protection.” In short, God the Father is simply the father you did or did not have. Rather than dread, propitiation, and trust, though, Holy Death are hellbent on killing that father, on ending that very kind of civilization that is marked by violent, devastating privation. “I am the least of thee / Holy Death speaks through me / You do nothing but leech / False prophet of misery,” opens the cataclysmic “Discarnate.” “You preyed on the weak, now Death comes to feast.” You, Church Fathers, avatars of the Holy Father, have fatted yourself on the weak, on those in need of protection. But now it is our time to slake our thirst and sate our hunger. This is vengeance. This is righteous. This is civilization.
Of course, Holy Death wants nothing more to do with this civilization. And why should they? It’s obvious. Freud writes, “It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.” So what comes next? What comes after this iteration of civilization? For Holy Death, there is no easy answer. For them, it is more chaos, another 400,000 years of the Kali Yuga cycle, the present age marked by conflict and sin. On “Psilocybin Dog Days” another favourite track of mine, the band weaves together Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist with the strung-out junkie riffs of Jimmy Bower on In the Name of Suffering to most directly wage war against the “pleasure in pain” of our illusory, hallucinatory world of broken bones and lonely death. “Chaos Reigns,” barks the fox. Could anything be more apt for 2025?
Freud is uncharacteristically optimistic at the end of The Future of an Illusion, arguing, “By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone.” Freud knew in 1927, as we know nearly a century later, this has yet to come to pass and might not ever. We still labour under an intolerable, oppressive state of things. Holy Death knows this, too. Freud’s answer was a life dedicated to alleviating mental suffering and diagnosing the ills of (Christian European) civilization. Holy Death’s answer is a sonic nailbat, swung with precision and liberatory intent. Either way, things must change.
Paradice is out now!
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