"That Album"

It's safe to say that every hardcore kid has "that album" - the album that originally sparked their interest in heavy music. I'm old, so I hear kids saying all the time how [Album A] from [Band A] came out way back in 2009 and changed their life, and I laugh a little inside, not at the kids' expense, but at the generation gap that exists in hardcore. Regretfully, I got into it right at the tail end of what seemed to be a golden age of hardcore, in 2005, a year after what is now my favorite album (Converge - You Fail Me) had come out. A friend yanked me out of my heavy radio-rock milieu and took me to a show at the New Brookland Tavern in Columbia (still the smelliest venue I've ever been to) to see Norma Jean, The Handshake Murders, Darkest Hour, Haste The Day, Still Remains and At All Cost. I remember nearly every detail, down to the beads of sweat hitting me from The Handshake Murders' set, and I still have the Norma Jean shirt I bought at the show (and I have to pretend the phantom smell of century-old cigarette smoke doesn't still emanate from it.)

All of this to say, "that album" for me is Norma Jean's Bless The Martyr & Kiss The Child. Not only did this album bring me into a headspace where I could understand heavy music as album-oriented and artful, instead of the violent garbage that the mainstream portrays it as, it has remained for me through music trend after music trend after cheesy music trend (there are no synth-lead dance beats or auto-tuned passages of melodious effeminate singing) to be one of the heaviest and most immersive albums in my mental catalog of hardcore albums.

So very many bands mix synth-leads and auto-tuned singing in what may be unintentional efforts to make their music more palatable, more packagable, more attractive to the average person. They straighten their hair and jog in place, they swing their guitars over their heads in synchronized fashion, they add any element of pop music that they can get their grubby little hands and throw it in their blender in order to shamelessly dilute what hardcore was meant to be in the first place - a rejection of all things mainstream. On Bless The Martyr . . ., Norma Jean kicks off the first song and doesn't stop playing until the last track is over, adding very few overdubs after the fact. The album was recorded live to tape in one hour-long playthrough and was never run through a computer until the final conversion to CD format. Every instrument sounds live and fresh, rich and full and the whole band is all over every beat, every note, every odd-metered passage. I won't go into the technical descriptions of every song, but suffice it to say that this album simultaneously showed me that heavy music can be artful and that music can be intense while not being straight-ahead 4/4 headbanging.

I go back to this album once every few months, and I imagine that for the foreseeable future, I always will. It holds a charm that cannot be matched by modern offerings, and I'm sure that there are legions of hardcore kids older than me who would laugh at getting into hardcore in 2005 when they were in it in 1995 (or 2004, depending on the person). Age is relative, and I find that the longer I go to shows, the older I feel than those around me. The local scene in Augusta used to consist mostly of people three or four years older than me, but the majority of them grew up or dropped out and now I'm above the average age by a few years, which is fine. It is being passed down, as it should be. But in my mind, it began for me in a dimly lit bar when I walked into a raging sea of bodies and The Handshake Murders were playing "Apostate", guitars and sweat flying, all knobs at 10 and a 14 year old me with my eyes wide watched, feeling at once so out of place but so at home.

"RUNNING AWAY . . ."

-Brian