Review Summary: “Dionysos does not take possession of the weak; he destroys them.”
The release of Saetia’s compilation
A Retrospective in late 2001 is often hailed as a landmark for the fledgling “screamo” genre it helped to define. It is celebrated for the rawness and aggression its songs display. Moments of sheer brutality are tempered by more melodic sections, a technique that soon became a cliché of the screamo style. The unpolished quality of many of the tracks, moreover, seemed to testify to the record’s authenticity. But the sad truth of
A Retrospective is that it remains a classic case of that sort of recording that, while foundational and thus highly influential for a genre, has been mistaken for being a great example of that genre. For even within the greater style of screamo – a grating, nigh-on unlistenable genre – there are far less embarrassing representatives to be found. Saetia’s
A Retrospective, by virtue of its mere priority, has found itself vaunted as one of the masterpieces of a genre that, to be quite honest, is sorely wanting in great music.
A Retrospective’s shortcomings are numerous. Perhaps the most glaringly obvious deficiency on the record is Billy Werner’s role as vocalist. At times, the vocal tracks are unforgivably godawful. Werner’s screaming alternates between a thin screech and a hideous yelp that is almost invariably sung at least a half-step out of key. During the singing parts that are relatively “cleaner,” he has the hackneyed tendency to drag the last note and trail it off for dramatic effect. His voice cracks often, giving a false sense of urgency or desperation to his wretched squawks.
Werner’s poor vocal performance is compounded, however, by the album’s thoroughly amateurish instrumentation and generally terrible recording quality. One might be generous and insist that the sloppiness and seeming anarchy of the recordings is intentional; even then, the mistakes often seem too haphazard to have planned. Sometimes the drums are simply not synchronized with the rest of the instruments, and this not as part of any greater scheme. Other times the guitarist’s tremolo picking doesn’t quite keep up with the succession of the measures and consequently spills over into the next. The middle section of “Ariadne’s Thread” is a perfect example of this, almost sounding like an instrumental section from Hum’s
Downward is Heavenward, except with an obnoxious overuse of guitar harmonics. The result is that even parts of Saetia’s songs such as this, which is decently composed, are so incompetently executed that their musical value is immediately nullified.
Needless to say,
A Retrospective’s production is not able to gloss over any of these failures. The recording quality is so poor that it sounds like it could have been recorded in somebody’s basement on an eight-track. Again, this might well be an inheritance from the punk scene. Saetia’s music, however, does not have the dumb, power chord simplicity that makes low-fi recordings work for punk.
Almost any one of the album’s seventeen tracks (discluding, for now, the five “hidden” tracks) highlights these fatal flaws. About fifty seconds into the opener, “Noutres Langues Nous Trompet,” the music grinds to a sudden halt (and not all at once), after which an actually decent melody is introduced on clean guitar. This serene moment is quickly ruined, however, as Werner bursts in with the repetition of the line “Believing...!”, sounding like a tantruming five-year-old. As the song draws to a close, he screams the word “Melting!” completely out of key with the rest, and then pointlessly adds a droned “uhhhhhhhhh” to the background of the last few bars. The spoken-word narration at the beginning of “Venus and Bacchus” is hilariously bad, and what follows afterward might go down as the worst shrieking in the history of recorded music.
Speaking of this track, it is the reviewer’s suspicion that it might hold the key to the famous death of the band’s original bassist, Alex Madara. In December 1998, Madara was placed into a coma attributed to a severe allergic reaction. A little over a week later, he died. Until now, this has been treated as a spontaneous, if tragic, misfortune. Here, for the first time, I would like to propose an alternate explanation, however speculative.
In his 1913 essay “Manner, Persona, Style,” the Russian Symbolist philosopher Viacheslav Ivanov, an advocate of the modern Nietzschean cult of Dionysos, wrote that “it is precisely Dionysos who has sent down this malady down upon us. For he in grace brings ‘true’ madness onto people and is also he who, when angered, brings down ‘untrue’ madness. In order to approach Dionysos, one needs strength; he raises this strength to abundance and overflowing.
Dionysos does not take possession of the weak; he destroys them” (
Selected Writings, pg. 62). Dionysos, of course, is the name of the Greek god of wine, whose Roman equivalent is Bacchus. By participating in the creation of music that, while supposedly paying homage to Bacchus/Dionysos, was unworthy of the god, Dionysos did wrathfully destroy one from among those offering such a pitiful and ugly sacrifice. Madara was simply the victim upon which Dionysos exacted his revenge. And so also in Euripides’ immortal
Bacchae, did the great god Dionysos, whose name is thunder, speak of blasphemous Pentheus: “I did him violence there…He never touched me, never grasped me; he fed upon his hopes.”
