Sacrilege NY – Thoughts Are But Dreams Til Their Effects Are Tried – (Wardance/Radio Raheem
Sacrilege NY – Thoughts Are But Dreams Til Their Effects Are Tried – (Wardance/Radio Raheem Records)
One wonders how many artifacts like this remain out there in the musical wild, nigh-forgotten chunks of adolescent noise lurking in the shadows of subcultural memory. There’s been something of a spike in interest in this sort of thing in recent years, almost elevating this unearthing of the past to its own sub-sub-genre status. And while it’s difficult to argue that some of these has-beens, might-have-beens, and never-weres may have been better off left in the past, there are certainly some forward-thinkers in the ranks of the disintired demos. Sacrilege (plus or minus the geographical modifier that separates them from the multitudes of other bands with the same name) is among this latter sort, with their recently recovered recordings made circa 1985 witnessing the band indulging in a few distinct brands of metallic punk thrash that were not widely popular in the US at the time but became more valued cultural currency in later decades.
Sacrilege, whose members had done time in Agnostic Front and Reagan Youth and would later go on to start Nausea and to join Chaos UK, represented a distinct current in American hardcore for their era. One that was largely unappreciated at the time.
The band’s output was split into even halves, each comprised of a demo recording, both of which stand in fairly stark contrast with each other. Though they’re both exceptionally raw sounding (despite the remastering job, it’s readily apparent this album was mastered from decades-old sources that were not preserved for posterity – the material occasionally will drop out mid-song – not in a shitty way necessarily but in kind of a charming manner that’s reminiscent of listening to a well-loved tape on a crappy boombox) the similarities end there.
The first demo, captured in its rough-hewn glory at Don Fury’s studio, sees the band operating in a vein not far removed from UK bands like Discharge or Scandinavian bands like Anti-Cimex – wall-of-sound guitar, hoarse vocals, and the sort of drumming that would later come to be called d-beat. Though the influences from which Sacrilege drew for these songs were not exclusive to them (Discharge influenced a pretty sizable chunk of hardcore and metal – whether their offshoots recognize it or not), few bands in the States were attempting anything so specifically along those lines.
The only American parallel might be Crucifix, and, while that band was slightly more polished and metallic, there are some very strong similarities between them and Sacrilege, especially vocally (most obviously, the intro to “Fallout Of Our Being” – later reincarnated as a Nausea song – is uncannily similar to that of “Dehumanization,” though pretty much all the vocals have a similar cadence, not that it’s a bad thing at all).
The second recording is a far more metallic affair. The band had fallen under the spell of Sodom, Venom, and the early proto-black metal bands and these influences coalesce over the crusty shell of their previous punk material into a harsh ball of noisy, chaotic pummeling that, had it been made in Norway two or three years later, might have been regarded as a seminal black metal release but instead fell upon deaf ears at the time of its creation (if it could be said to have fallen upon many ears at all, considering this batch of songs was apparently more of a studio incarnation of the band than anything). While the earlier, more hardcore-oriented material was solid, the metal half comes off as slightly more ahead of its time, with gnarled slabs of primitive, fucked-sounding tangles of sound that tear at the speakers with an intense viciousness.
The variations between Sacrilege’s two halves might seem a bit jarring, but their versatility only underscores the importance of this material seeing the light of day. Though they were largely forgotten, within a period of a year they were able to act as one of the earliest American bands working in a crust/d-beat vein and one of the country’s first black metal acts. The material is raw and unpolished and, though the influences are worn very openly on the sleeve, the music’s prescience and vicious energy help imbue it with a life beyond the brief window of time the band was extant.
