This Moment In Black History – Public Square (Smog Veil)
There is a sort of sonic sweet spot that the best rock bands can manage to wedge themselves into at their more inspired moments – where songs are possessed by an unhinged energy and dangle over the precipice of incoherence, remaining adhered only by force of enthusiasm. Technical accuracy is all well and good, but it’s this inspired shamble that has acted as a sort of prankster deity in the often narrow confines of the rock and roll canon – offending sensibilities while challenging preconceptions and pushing the cultural envelope to new extremes. While the Stooges, Pere Ubu, early Sonic Youth and the like may have been unlistenable to the masses of music fans of their respective eras, one would be forgiven a cringe or two when considering what music would be like in their absence (it’s debatable whether those bands’ subsequent approval and incorporation by the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame/Spin Magazine establishment supports or refutes their revolutionary status, but that’s a whole different article). Because so many bands err on the side of caution, when an album pops up that chooses to walk a different path, a wise listener would do well to pay attention. And this different path is exactly the one chosen by Cleveland, Ohio’s This Moment In Black History.
This Moment In Black History – Public Square (Smog Veil)
There is a sort of sonic sweet spot that the best rock bands can manage to wedge themselves into at their more inspired moments – where songs are possessed by an unhinged energy and dangle over the precipice of incoherence, remaining adhered only by force of enthusiasm. Technical accuracy is all well and good, but it’s this inspired shamble that has acted as a sort of prankster deity in the often narrow confines of the rock and roll canon – offending sensibilities while challenging preconceptions and pushing the cultural envelope to new extremes. While the Stooges, Pere Ubu, early Sonic Youth and the like may have been unlistenable to the masses of music fans of their respective eras, one would be forgiven a cringe or two when considering what music would be like in their absence (it’s debatable whether those bands’ subsequent approval and incorporation by the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame/Spin Magazine establishment supports or refutes their revolutionary status, but that’s a whole different article). Because so many bands err on the side of caution, when an album pops up that chooses to walk a different path, a wise listener would do well to pay attention. And this different path is exactly the one chosen by Cleveland, Ohio’s This Moment In Black History.
That this band is well-versed in rock history is readily apparent. There is no small amount of influence borrowed from the swaggering proto-punk of Rocket From The Tombs and The Pagans in more mid-tempo songs like “Pollen Count,” many of which incorporate the Farfisa organ, hearkening back further to Nuggets-era garage rock. Songs like “Makes My Teeth White,” however, hover closer to the forward thrust of Black Flag combined with the twitchy discordance of early-90s bands like Swing Kids or Drive Like Jehu. On paper, the approach might seem trite – a guided tour of a rock and roll fringe mainstreamed by nostalgia and critical retrospectives or buried by obscurity and the awful curse of being ahead of its time. But the songs are delivered with a venom which makes any curatorial approach seem less academic and more a labor of love.
Lyrically, the album isn’t as consistently cohesive, though it is not completely lacking in inspired moments, and much of the delivery makes up for shortcomings. “Panopticon” is a great example – while other bands of late have tackled the Jeremy Bentham-by-way-of-Michel-Foucault idea of surveillance as social control (most notably a certain snoozefest of a “post-metal” band), This Moment In Black History don’t utilize as didactic an approach to the topic. While it is the most explicitly topical of their songs, with lines like “cameras watching but who is looking / others cannot act like this does not exist / create the fiction of demiurge,” the lyrics consist of fragmentary images, ideas that seem fully formed then shattered and re-arranged into something vaguely familiar yet disconcerting. There seems to be an overarching paranoia to the album, an exegesis of Iggy’s “TV Eye,” a peripheral vision of the madness which is so barely contained by the mundane. The songs contain classrooms and police precincts, drug stores and the titular public squares, but present each in a narrative voice that suggests they are simply façades flaking away from some terrifying unknown. “Everything is under construction or making a sucking sound” begins “Pollen Count” – as if to suggest that modern man perceives himself in a vacuum and is possessed by a knee-jerk impulse to fill that emptiness with artifice.
The extent to which a listener might perceive the lyrics as too self-consciously arty or lacking in cohesion should not be a deterrent. This is nobody’s philosophy graduate thesis. It is a rock and roll album which seeks to occupy the infinitesimal razor’s edge between coherence and confusion that the best of every subgenre has produced. It may not be easily palatable, but the most memorable bands rarely are.
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This Moment In Black History performs at Strange Matter on August 7th with Antlers, Sun God, and Sports Bar. 929 W. Grace St.
