Review Summary: Relativity, brutality and the digestibility of the apocalypse.
Ulcerate are an interesting band. They do strange things to time; back when they broke me into their wider audience 2009’s
Everything Is Fire, times were also strange. That album voiced many feelings I had unknowingly suppressed about the shared intrigue and repulsion that dissonance carry in its fiercest and most craftful deployments. These feelings were inconsistent, and the album went down strangely with my processing of time in general. Sometimes it would blitz past before I could absorb a single note. Other times it was a personal struggle to get through each track because of how fixated I was on each individual moment; the album went by so slowly I wondered if I was about to hear it in reverse. These observations quickly became feelings, and deep-rooted ones at that: what does it mean to be moved by dissonance? Honestly, I’m not sure. It keep trying to explain it, but other things take precedence. Everyone keeps trying to talk about the end of the world or nothing at all, both for salient reasons. How is Ulcerate supposed to fit into that?
My personal situation has not given rise to ideal circumstances, either. Allow me to explain: I know many would insist on the abandonment of personal situations at the doorstep as far as the enlightened critique of technical death metal is concerned, but if there’s one stigma that has blighted the genre’s platform unnecessarily, it’s the misconception of its being an avenue of misdirection for (usually) grown (always) men who spent too much time learning to appreciate incomprehensible gutturals about dated brimstone instead of taking the time to reflect on and routinely express their own feelings about emotions and other insecurities. Let us talk about feelings then - not simple because we can, but moreover because they are actively pertinent to this music. They are, after all, a reactionary and likely intentional project of its craft, amongst other factors of circumstance. These two must be covered as appropriate; the notion of personal feelings without personal biography is simply silly.
Delving into the thick of things, a few months ago - before Coronavirus burst its balloon over my native Russia - I was stationed on a remote alternative education campus some 100 miles out from Yakusk. The school is a large-scale holistic experience for 13-18 year-olds that has been running for around five years now, with tentative government backing. My current publication (I am a journalist) had arranged for me to spend two weeks there as cooperative research for an article that will doubtless carry more political weight than I intend it to. I cannot openly criticise my publication on this platform, but despite my misgivings on the assignment, the school turned out to be a friend and constructive institution, and I enjoyed my time their greatly at first. I say ‘at first’, because I have been there for multiple moons now: things became troublesome with the virus in Russia midway through my assigned period, and since the school is both remote and adequately equipped, my editor arranged for my stint to be prolonged indefinitely - all (as he told me) for the sake of a better article-report. Some secret patch of my skin has been crawling ever since.
For the school, life carries on unchanged; holistic models of education are, after all, able to respond to international crises in more flexible ways than your traditional curriculum! However, I continue to approach my role as an impartial observer with moderate severity, and this has had obvious implications for my integration into the school environment. Most of them are too focused on the end of the world or the all-encompassing minutiae of their endlessly idiosyncratic routine to notice me, not that this is any bother; there are something like a thousand people there, so it is a struggle to engage individually with the majority. Inevitably, some pay me more attention, almost childishly excited by the presence of an outsider, and out of these I have got to know a few. My spirits are invariably raised whenever I bump into 15 year-old Lada with her boyish energy and gleefully absent attention span, deadpan 17 year-old Alexei with his inexplicable fondness for words such as “explain” and “ambitious”, perhaps only two discernible polysyllables in his lexis on account of an incomprehensible local dialect from the easterlands, or Galina the young teacher whose sensitivity to the various seniority complexes that criss-cross the staff-room (and any room occupied by Russians above the age of forty, if I’m honest) has imbued her with the endearingly farcical habit of apologising for each and every circumstance that occurs within her vicinity.
However, these encounters are all very much exceptions in the face of an otherwise stifling circulation of observations. Students cram themselves into steamed-up classroom to study such phenomena as the treachery of the Marshall plan and the scientific principles behind central heading; I observe. Boys and girls in pink uniforms (the establishment is dubiously unisex) bustle into the gymnasium to cheer each other on in basketball drills and volleyball rallies; I observe. A teacher in the staff room adds one zero too many to print command on their latest dispatch of worksheets and the colour cartridges are drained; some sigh, some laugh, and I observe. My report, long since complete, curdles in the uneasiness of the circumstances of its own commission; I observe it with the utmost distaste. The point here is not so far off as it may seem; time slowly starts to stand still, and the speed of my own thoughts steadily becomes a more reliable timekeep than the classroom clocks. The rates of change here are blurred to the point of near-stasis. After all, how many times can you independently observe a ripe basketball rebounding off a gym floor before you start to question whether anything has truly changed from
thud to
thud? The number is perhaps lower than you expect, and at a certain point you may wonder whether you have been watching the same bounce all along.
Since the content of my thoughts and, if you will, feelings has become a disturbingly more accurate yardstick for reality than my physical environment, the object of their concern has become unusually significant. This is where Ulcerate re-enter the picture. Their latest album
Stare into Death and Be Still had been in and out of my headphones since its release, but during my time at the school it became a deeply demanding focus - or perhaps merely a focus that my circumstances had deeply demanded. Whatever the particularities, this album is thoroughly rewarding to this kind of attention. The band have changed tack considerably from the skilful mystification of their own craft that made
Shrines of Paralysis such a source of intrigue, instead presenting their apocalyptic fission as a relatively digestible form of brutality. For Ulcerate, the end times have always been here, yet on this album, whether it be on the cosmos-reaving strain of “Inversion” or the mesmeric pulse of “Drawn Into the Next Void”, they seem to be more intent than ever on articulating them in a form that absolutely anyone can recognise. As I stare at the thick grey curtains in my modest room, feeling the convection overhead as my freezing ceiling repels the rising vestiges of central heading against my cranium, these articulations lock arms with both my most intimate reality and the tumultuous context of the world outside, standing as something fiercely contemporary that just about anyone should be able to feel. Ulcerate’s apocalypse may be one of death metal, but it no longer feels like something to be shared solely between connoisseurs of the genre.
Colour me bemused, then, that the people here are reluctant to engage with the practical specifics of financial and sanitary ruin that are presently hemming our country and the wider world into the darkest of corners, let alone the potency of contemporary music in a style finally at its zenith as a potential focusing lens for said ruin. The bigger a crowd, the less attention can afforded for such specific - and there is always a crowd here. Indeed, the corridors are thick with the hottest Russian blood pounding their feet on the floorboards as they surge from room to room. The heat of the moment changes pivots from class to class, subject to subject, and anything too far beyond these ultra-precise changes of direction would turn the happy heat of friction into the flush of fluster. We hardly have time to discuss the news-headline dimensions of the apocalypse as it is; it’s hard for me to get a word in edgeways most days. Recently, I was walking around during the window between classes and saw Lada in the hallway at the foot of the staircase I was descending. She saw me approaching perpendicular to her direction, squeaked, and waved. I waved back, asking how she was, and in her haste to reply she walked directly into a table. The crowd surged forwards and there wasn't even time to ask if she was alright (I later learned that she had taken the crash largely in her stride). This is all well and good, but imagine if I had tried to start a conversation about something as complex and meaningful as the relative digestibility of the brutal apocalypse as heard on the new Ulcerate record with her. It would be a miracle if she came out of it able to speak at all.
When, then, is it appropriate to discuss the particularities of relatively digestible brutality and apocalypse as heard on the new Ulcerate record? This is a question I have been asking myself many times since. For every moment that never arises, the need seems to grow greater. Yesterday I took a detour between the classes I was due to sit in on, and went to the lavatory opposite the staff room. I put my folder down on a convenient filing cabinet before going in with accidental surplus force - a thud and crash transpired within the same sound, though no harm was done - and Galina, midway through a frittering the spare minutes away with a small group of arbitrarily anxious girls, apologised immediately. I suppose she felt uncomfortable for allowing herself to witness such a moment of potential embarrassment. Why, oh why - I asked myself as my face was warmed by the steam ascending from my radiant stream - could she not have that replaced that apology, apropos nothing, with a firm opening for reciprocal conversation. “Tell me how you really feel,” or something to that effect. Jesus, I immediately thought, that would be a bit much; that’s the kind of thing you say when you’re trying to cross off excuses not to sleep with someone. Galina is certainly charming and I would have no qualms with that manner of interaction, but at this point I would genuinely rather she allowed me to siphon off my repressed feelings concerning the decline of civilisation and the new Ulcerate album than offer to sleep with me. Chances are I would end up making a mess and she’d feel obliged to apologise for it. I don’t need those kinds of stains on my conscience.
Coming back to the album at night, I almost started to doubt myself. Is the clarity of contemporary vision that I derive from the streamlined clamour and churning chaos of
Stare into Death and Be Still merely a frantic act of projection aimed at making something, just one thing, about the world that supposedly exists outside of this educational warphouse feel real in a language I understand? Likely not, say Jamie Saint Merat’s hideously clear drum tones two minutes into “The Lifeless Advance.” A performance that assured and expressive could never be a vehicle for acts of listener projection in the same way as the typical, mindless conduits such as minimal techno or post-bubblegum would allow for. Ulcerate are a world unto themselves at this point; who am I to imagine that my hapless acts of projecting my own feelings of individual loneliness and global despair could ever touch that? I consider my position. If
Stare into Death and Be Still supposedly transcends the trite prestige of death metal acclaim on account of being an album for its times, yet its pertinence as such is impractical as a topic for interpersonal conversation at a crackpot school full of young minds dangerously susceptible to alternative perspectives and standpoints of global transmission, then does it really succeed at all? Today, after one coffee too many and a sleepless night of failing to convince myself to find the unshuffle button while marathoning the Ulcerate discog once again (please listen to these songs in the intended order - don’t repeat my error!), I found my surly buddy Alexei taking a study break (a concept that needs no introduction, but is widely encouraged at all times of day for those in need - the school recognises that hormones sometimes need fresh air and limited algebra as an environment to untangle themselves). I joined him and thought of sharing the whole scheebang once and for all - seventeen is surely a reasonable age for a human male to recognise the global significance of death metal, after all. I look at him, he looks at me; we recognise each other, even if this does not amount to an instant understanding. His lips open:
“Ambitious.”
Thank you for reading my feelings about relativity and the brutality of the digestible apocalypse.
