"You see that? [Holding clenched fist, then striking Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper) across the bridge of the nose.] That smarts, doesn't it? Getting slammed in the nose. Fucks you all up. You get that pain shootin' through your brain, your eyes fill up with water. That ain't any kind of fun. But what I have to offer you, that's as good as it's gonna get. And it won't ever get that good again." — Vincenzo Coccotti (Christopher Walken) — "True Romance"
Last winter a young strapping lad by the name of Ironlung decided that he had spent far too much time inside his books (Foucault, Burroughs, Agee, Ginsberg) and fishing alone on the Atlantic. He called in the Scissorfight brigade — brother Kevin J. Strongbow on drums, Jarvis on bass guitar and Geezum H. Crow on electric guitar — and brought them down from the mountains of northern New England to give body to the words, theories, and illusions beating down on his subconscious.
Ironlung and the boys opened their veins and bled five songs, delivering a perfect Vincenzo Coccotti right cross to the unwashed urchins of metal.
Potential New Agent for Unconventional Warfare is 22 minutes of aggressive agony. No foreplay for the men of Scissorfight — straight to the screw.
Beginning with "Hex," two minutes of animalist rock-punk-metal focus. Scissorfight have come to our local 7-Eleven in the form of Snake Plisskin to announce our end. Instead of bullets and clubs, Scissorfight use pillaging power chords and lyrical insight to warn the masses: "Sun reflecting in a flying crow's eye/ Sunnnnn reflecting! Yeah!"
"Riverhorse" starts off with a multi-track riff straight out of AC/DC high school. Jarvis and Geegus know that you can only fight the elements — air-wind, water-ocean, rock-mountain — with the obvious: electric guitar-Angus. Ironlung echoes his fellow warrior's nihilism: "Drive to survive/ It makes no difference anyway/ Ride the trip inside/ The whole damn highway ablaze." They all jump in on the chorus to remind us that the ways of the 20th century are extinct: "Blood on the Road/ And the road is on fire."
The men flee into the sea on "Maritime Disasters," a bass-guitar steamroller smirking defiantly in the face of our inevitable end at the hand of Mother Nature: "I am a lighthouse/Or lantern swingin/Youre navigating/I am radiating." Geezum's solo briefly climbs out of the water, a submarine cresting briefly to launch multiple nuclear six-string warheads into the eye of the beast. Mission accomplished, Geegus recedes back into the water, letting the chorus take him down to the depths.
The ocean no longer safe, the Scissorfight tribe leaves the water and heads for the hills on "Running the Risk of Raining Buffalo." The end near, Ironlung incoherently mumbles lyrics off the top of his shaved dome, spitting shards of broken teeth, power cords falling all around him. "Right-on" is the final death nail/battle-cry before the stampede overtakes them all.
Scissorfight morph into an all-powerful demon for the crunching closer, "Harvester." A deity has arrived to clear the earth, the sea and sky of all that is living and good. All vegetation wilted to muck, wood to rot, metal to liquid, rock to sand. Charred, fiery ruins everywhere. The women and the children are crying and the men are bleeding from the mouth, tongues swollen, spirit snatched.
Scissorfight have been here. Long live Scissorfight.
"I just wanted to destroy something beautiful." — narrator (Edward Norton), "Fight Club"
|
