Punishment Through Time

January 16th, 2019

Holocene, by Horehound 

Our Raw Heart, by YOB

“It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood. We know it, because we have had to learn it.” – Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed 

“An audience of old stone in ancient theatre, watching a circle made hard to last. Each rock a number against years to come.” – Douglas Noble, Counting Stones: A hymn of Castlerigg

I’m a metal dilettante, always have been, but 2018 was a good year for really wallowing in some bad feelings, what with ever escalating anti-refugee rhetoric that can only act as an appetiser for brutality, anti-trans campaigning from “moderates” who’d call their own arguments out if they saw them applied elsewhere, the fact that people in power are so wedded to what they have that we’re all fully booked up for climate change and mass death in our lifetime, endless dead storytelling, the flailing triumph of tactics over strategy…  all of this served as my excuse for listening to endless spiralling riffs and blown out shredder symphonies last year.

The connection between the music and my mood is probably bollocks, mind, but I’m in my mid-30s now and I sometimes need to lie to myself about my indulgences. Thankfully, Horehound were there to help me out at the end of  2018. Their sludgy blues takes the idea of defeat for granted, uses it as a starting point, even – the first words on Holocene are “Rise/Rise/We take and give nothing”, words that are howled with revulsion, an embittered acknowledgement of a detested status quo.

Defiance follows, a yearning for a break that is so dramatic as to seem impossible…