When Rotten Ideas Break Free: Miserably Ever After’s Multiple Fatalities
“Broken bones crumble as you fight for your life.”
Of all the bands that metabolized the post-mortem pastiche of Eyehategod‘s insurmountable drug- and booze-fed misery, Grief always struck me as the most literal. Maybe it was the cover of 1993 edition of Dismal: a strip-cut black-and-white photo of a child squatting solemnly on the wreckage of his young life. Maybe it was how they stripped away some of Eyehategod’s more southern stylings, leaving enough of those bluesy runs intact for the influence to be unmistakable but not a direct copy. Records like Come to Grief and Miserably Ever After are, somehow, bleaker and drearier than In the Name of Suffering or Take as Needed for Pain, though for all their anguish there is less wanton viciousness and casual disregard for decency in those albums. (It’s hard to imagine Mike Williams getting wrapped up so straightforwardly in cultural politics like on “Straight Edge/Closed Mind.”) Perhaps its geographical, swapping the oppressive swamps of Louisiana for New England’s cloudy and rain-soaked gloom. Perhaps it’s just more Sabbath and less Skynyrd.
Oklahoma- and Georgia-based Miserably Ever After are, 30 years later, taking obvious cues from Grief and Eyehategod alike, though slowing things down to a burdened and lugubrious writhing. Featuring Decomposed Dave (Pale Fallen Dead, Slothmoss, Within Death’s Kingdom) on bass and drums and Eric Crowe (ex-Molehill, ex-Social Infestation, Atlanta’s Crawl) on guitar and vocals, Miserably Ever After recently released their first LP Multiple Fatalities via Fruita’s Rotting Sun Records as well as Atlanta’s Doomsayer Records. Without overlooking Dave Coates’ contribution to the duo’s collaborative affair, it’s hard not to think of Miserably Ever After as one more iteration of Crowe’s life-long mission to document suffering, drawing a crooked line from the influences mentioned above through the Grief-influenced and radically underrated Molehill and the oft-overlooked Crawl to this new project. It’s a commitment, after all.
“A Passion for Dying” opens with Crowe’s visceral rasps and a brief bluesy burst before crashing down immediately to the paralytic (and consistent) pacing of the rest of Multiple Fatalities. Slimy southern flourishes abound on the record, and you can feel the influence of Jimmy Bower on Crowe’s guitar tone, but the band is most often operating at the “speed” of Burning Witch and Corrupted. “Pieces of Bodies” is a collage of almost-played riffs that offer a little flair in an otherwise empty and colourless world. The song’s final minute is almost a groove, debased and floundering in utter disregard. Much of the rest of Multiple Fatalities follows a similar trajectory, channeling Grief while playing Thou at quarter-speed. Album standout “Dying in a Ditch” almost feels redemptive or combative, though such lifeforces are fleeting if not entirely illusory. It’s an impressive feat that these seven moribund minutes have the heft of narrative purport and the sharpness of the lance of lethargy. It’s true of the entire album. While everything on Multiple Fatalities is designed to drag you down and demoralize you, you leave every track with an odd sense of vituperative vigour that can’t be undermined by the slow crush and piling up of reality’s disappointments.
Between the seemingly never-ending pollen season of Atlanta, the smoke from South Georgia fires finding its way north, and whatever else we’ve decided is just going to be the best of the worst to come in the air we breathe, I have spent the last week or two with a lump in my throat that seems impossible to dislodge. As much as it’s the body reacting to all those irritants, it’s also the kind of irritating swelling that allegorizes a build-up of bile and misanthropic mucosity. I walk around trying to expel this wad of particulates and pain, though mostly its just amounts to ineffectual and nervy throat-clearing. Oh, to upchuck this ill will and lacerate my vocal chords in the process. Instead, I’m left “choking on life.”
It feels a bit besides the point to bring up our current and any future techno-dystopia when thinking about Multiple Fatalities, stripped bare of anything even resembling the future to better focus on the pulsating here-and-now of the “slow erosion of meaning in real time.” But the first half of Michel Nieva’s Technology and Barbarism (translated by Rahul Bery and Daniel Hahn) provides at least another outlet for processing all this withering cruelty and unmitigated hostility. “Capitalist science fiction,” writes Nieva, “is the fantastical story of ‘humanity without a world,’ of tourists who live for a thousand years and travel through the cosmos taking selfies while the Earth burns, allowing the corporate establishment to cling onto a hegemony over imagining different futures, having already left societies unable to imagine their own.” As Nieva will explore else in the first half of the book, the very logic of extractive capitalism that has left Earth so barren becomes the bedrock for fantasies about terraforming Mars using the same polluting technologies to warm Mars’ atmosphere to make it inhabitable by the groveling billionaires suctioned to the underbelly of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These ghouls, entirely bereft of any real imagination for a livable future, use their vast resources to rob us of our ability to imagine and then create any number of possibly different futures here on Earth together though altered. It leaves one sickened and disoriented, constantly clenching one’s fists and incapable of ever really articulating in any meaningful or seismic way the “discomfort, anger, and resignation” at the heart of Multiple Fatalities. How can we judge those who “Gave Up On Life” in the face of such “Deviant Savagery”? And while we might find cold comfort in the Upsidedown Cross-inspired irreverence of album-closer “Satan is Our Pal,” irreverence is seemingly all that’s left us as salve when facing down the flop-sweating, and beet-red visage of Peter Thiel and his quest to end the human experience as we’ve known it.
Collaborate in grief. Conspire in pain. Collude in misery. We may all live miserably ever after, but in that misery we still may all live.
Multiple Fatalities is out digitally and on cassette
via Rotting Sun and Doomsayer.
Hit play and get fuckin’ bummed.
