Lightning Bolt are the Fight Club of rock, their tense muscles and
masculine intensity and two-dudes-in-a-van prison-loving a
turned-inwards celebration of violence as form of evolutionary beauty.
Black Eyes bear and wear the same scars of so many scrapes, and they do
so with pride, but the DC outfit aren't fighting in an enclave, hoping
their microcosm can influence the macrocosm. Rather, they're railing
against the society that surrounds them, their wars fought with wars
fought abroad. Their poetry a commentary on hypocrisy, they cast judgments on
those who cast judgment, as men, like they're God, such staunch standing like
a line drawn in the sand, like they wish to make
their side of the line the place punk-rock spirit is holy, their
conception of it, and all this, being that the days of heedful
pre-millennial tension have been replaced by smug post-millennial
satisfaction. Black Eyes work to capture that tension, to make it their
captive, their music placing tension within parameters. By setting the
cat of free-ranging/free-rein free-jazz fuckery amongst the pigeons of
hardcore's mighty-uptighty militarism, the quintet are creating a
carefully controlled chaos where all the discord leaves aesthetic
abrasions: the bruised eye-sockets of their fightin' spirit matched with
bloody-lipped horn-honk and concussive drums, guitars played with ripped
skin left clinging to the strings, tiny traces of flesh under the
players' nails. The ultimate depiction of their cultivated friction
comes in the opposing voices of Hugh McElroy and Daniel
Martin-McCormick, their distinctly different throats throwing up vocals
that often run directly into each other, set against each other in songs
that wish to maximize their differences for maximum tension. The
discordance of this hoarse/screech disparity/polarity could be seen as
typically Dischordian; but the vocal yin-yang of
McElroy/Martin-McCormick goes far beyond simple Ian/Guy sportsmanship.
The spilling collision of their tangled metal/glass tonality inhabits
the sort of off-the-end-of-the-pier post-hardcore plunge taken by those
two dudes in the Blood Brothers. |
