“I Adorn I Adore”: Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean‘s Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On
“I drink my love.”
At the end of “An Abundance of Mercy,” Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean‘s nameless vocalist asks repeatedly, “Who else / but the rope and / the fucking chain?” I’ve added the punctuation mark, perhaps disfiguring the rhetorical thrust of the question, promulgating as it is nonplussed. For the last 9 years, Springfield, Massachusetts’ anonymous 4-piece has been insisting on this very question. The “who” of the question making humans out of the rope and chain, familiar comrades and wardens alike. And so they ask again: Who else but the fucking chain? Who else but the fuckin’ Chain? It’s the shackles wrapped around the faceless heads. It’s the band themselves, whoever they are. It’s the choking, anaerobic feeling of modern life. It’s all our wild attempts to unlink ourselves from a misery that extends deep into the past and far into the future. So “let me run.” So “let me rot.”
Out this Friday on Redscroll Records, Let Us Not Speak of Them But Look and Pass On is the busy band’s latest EP, 20 minutes of suffocating unadorned sludge in the collapsed vein of Thou and Grief. Lest you think this latest release has any bluesy swagger, perish the thought. Rather, it is ugliness pulsating through and through. How does one find any time to move your hips or nod your head or relax your shoulders or breathe a little sigh of relief when everything couldn’t be worse. Riffs, drums, and vocals punch alike, swinging with tectonic velocity. “The. Knife. Hid. Den. In. Hand. The. Knife. Hid. Den. In Heart.” Each syllable plosive and fricative, phonetically vile and pain-punched. Each blow lands and indents, makes it mark deeper and deeper; each moment like a needle in slow motion scrawling out the world’s most agonizing tattoo.
But let me amend that statement. Maybe Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean have something of a saunter to them after all. Lead single “An Adornment of Light” moves, at times, with a grotesque pomposity, daring to rip its listeners out of the pitch-black mire they’ve created with the nastiest kind of harmonizing solo. Beginning around 5:23, the alarm is sounded and all the rage and anger and hunger and thirst crash through the levees and catharsis arrives, if only for a few moments. Pummeling Primitive Man-esque feedback gives way to cymbal clinks that feel audacious and mocking. There is a sneering attitude to “An Adornment of Light,” one wrapped up in the sardonic title of it and its sister track “An Abundance of Mercy” that finds its most obvious expression in these final minutes of the song. “I can show you / Just how broken / A wing can be.” Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean possess a certain magnitude, a certain clarity of vision, that manifests in a horrible form of knowing. Here, from the bottom of the ocean where we remain chained, we can look up and tell you how blank a faded mind can be, how deep a cut to your hand can go, how gruesomely and completely and eternally a wing can break. All that sunken, excruciating wisdom. The band’s “cross to bear.”
In E.M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops,” an all-encompassing machine replete with communications applications like an Edwardian Facetime device has reorganized human life. Everyone lives underground in rooms “hexagonal in shape like the cell of a bee.” If humans travel at all, they do so by hulking air-ships and hate the journey. The originating action of the short story is Kuno begging his mother Vashti to visit him. Ultimately pestered into it, Vashti takes a trip to visit a son she detests. During the flight, the story’s narrator relates that man “had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of the child.” Echoing such sentiments, Vashti murmurs, “No ideas here” while looking away from the Caucasus, repeating that same dictum “No ideas here” while hiding “Greece behind a metal blind.” The world has been defeated, fully, and the machine is ascendant.
Of course, by novel’s end, the machine has cracked apart and broken down in a Kafka-esque series of bureaucratic failures, leaving the people of the world dying in a new silence initiated when the hum of the machine ends. Vashti, still attached to the machine that had become her new god, assures herself, “‘Oh, to-morrow—some fool will start the Machine again, to-morrow.'” Kuno replies, “‘Never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.'” “As he spoke,” ends the final paragraph of the story, “the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed downwards in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.” There is, apparently, only one way to learn our lesson.
It is not difficult to find the immediate and obvious parallels between Forster’s dystopia and our own world. In “Execution,” the album’s final track, there are traces of Kuno’s dying declaration, of the hard-won wisdom of “An Adornment of Light.” “I will make hope your place of pain,” announces the band, before sinking their bloody teeth into our already pulverized flesh. “Let it sink in. Let them sink in” ends the song and album. There is nothing left here at the end of history but to let the bloody teeth of cold reality sink in. Come what may.
Let Us Not Speak Of Them But Look And Pass On
is out via Redscroll Records on Friday, February 20th.
The digital is hella cheap. Get some uglyseeves. Get a shirt.
Grab some vinyl. Grab a tape while you still can.
