Low Threat Profile – Product 2 (Deep Six/Draw Blank Records)
Aging can be a dreary experience. What once seemed magical often comes to resemble a gilded pile of shit, one whose sparkle becomes more tarnished with each passing day. As a (purely hypothetical) example: winter’s first snowfall was great when it bought you a day home from school, but the appeal recedes quickly when it comes time to dig your car out from under eight inches of accumulation at six in the morning. This while you’re praying to the higher power you stopped believing in years ago that you don’t slip on the sheet of ice in front of your house, because you haven’t been able to afford health insurance at any point in your independent life.
Low Threat Profile – Product 2 (Deep Six/Draw Blank Records)
Aging can be a dreary experience. What once seemed magical often comes to resemble a gilded pile of shit, one whose sparkle becomes more tarnished with each passing day. As a (purely hypothetical) example: winter’s first snowfall was great when it bought you a day home from school, but the appeal recedes quickly when it comes time to dig your car out from under eight inches of accumulation at six in the morning. This while you’re praying to the higher power you stopped believing in years ago that you don’t slip on the sheet of ice in front of your house, because you haven’t been able to afford health insurance at any point in your independent life.
Music is similar. Songs once seemed like magical things, materializing out of some cassette player to reach through the ear canals and pluck whatever synapses are responsible for the head nodding rhythmically of its own accord. As facilitators of this quasi-magical process, musicians were easy to deify; each tattooed howler a prophet, each show a fork in the road. Fast forward a few years and the realization that most musicians are dicks and most songs are bullshit weighs heavy on the mind of anybody who fully immersed themselves in, or defined themselves by, some combination of the twelve notes utilized in ninety-nine percent of Western music. Some take it to heart and fall by the wayside, investing their energies in procreation, religion, or fantasy football leagues. But others trudge on, and Low Threat Profile are an excellent example of a handful of hardcore punk lifers that never let their lack of a sunny disposition drive a wedge between them and the act of making killer music.
I’d imagine most people who sought this album out did so based on Low Threat Profile’s pedigree–its members have done time in Lack Of Interest, No Comment, and Infest–and will not be the tiniest bit disappointed with what the band has come up with. Basically, anybody familiar with any of the members’ previous bands will know exactly what to expect. For those unacquainted, that translates to fourteen frantic blurts of hardcore, averaging about thirty seconds in length. Unlike so many bands attempting this style now, none of Low Threat Profile’s members have played music for less than a quarter of a century, and it shows. The music is played with a competence that can only come from the most intimate familiarity with the genre. This familiarity informs the lyrics as well, inspiring the album’s almost schizophrenic outlook. The bulk of the songs might charitably be called negative. “All my hopes and all my dreams / none of these I will achieve,” singer Andrew Beattie howls at the end of “Back To Basics”–a song that could possibly the best forty-three seconds of music this genre has produced in a long time. But taking his words at face value isn’t the point. Hardcore’s flirtation with this sort of exaggerated nihilism wasn’t about literal accuracy, but rather an exorcism of all the frustrations that can’t be pushed aside with a show of good will. Songs like these spare nobody and nothing–not music (the album’s title song excoriates the exploitative capitalist business models hardcore has become so fond of lately), not society (“Vampires” takes aim at “plastic people and their plastic hearts”), and not himself.
But other songs take a wildly divergent path. Like an unmedicated manic-depressive, the album’s content races up from the lowest valleys of hate and despair towards relatively (for this type of music at least) positive content. Songs like “A Part Of Society” take aim at the sort of punk rocker who would blame society’s ills for their own misfortune, but the approach is almost like a motivational speaker using certain Emilio Estevez quotes from Repo Man for inspiration. While lyrics to songs like “This Fight’s Not Over”–the accusatory sentiment directed towards the conformist masses, the chest-thumping reassurances the singer would never surrender to such impulses, etc.–aren’t exactly uncommon in hardcore, the decades that Low Threat Profile’s members have dedicated to some of the most relentless music ever committed to tape lend the words a degree of credibility not necessarily found in bands lacking the same experience. “My One And Only True Love,” the album’s final song (and longest, at an epic minute and fifty-eight seconds), emphasizes that point more clearly, detailing a thirty-year love affair with the “same words” and “same chords,” an obsession with “saying fuck fucking or fucked,” and a fierce devotion to music that cuts through life’s bullshit like a finely-honed blade, accentuating the triumphs and laying waste to the failures. If growing older sounds like this, then nobody needs to worry.
