Everywhere that liberty goes, it leaves a path of destruction. Fast food, bad architecture, materialism, rampant greed, environmental destruction, imperial conquest, class struggle; these phenomena, when combined, seem to be synonymous with Liberty.So just as its called liberty when war and greed stalk the land, Ian Svenonius calls his band Chain & the Gang. Like a true chain gang, theyre on the road to confront and defy any freedom-lovers that come across their path. They shuffle, manacled, across railway yards, and through graveyards; theyre on the side of the road, picking up the garbage as they walk, as people drive by, yelling at them. All they can do is become a chorus of metal meeting metal, hands hitting hands and a collective voice louder than one. How do they describe their sound? Something they just found. They dug it up from the ground. Essential to that soil: guitar, drums, organ, saxophone and chants; paying off our collective debt to the universe. There are songs with a driving locomotive engine (Reparations, Interview with the Chain Gang), a full-on choir of the disenfranchised (Cemetery Map, Deathbed Confession, Trash Talk) and disentangled, soul-influenced invitations to a celebration (Room 19 and Unpronounceable Name).Down With Liberty … Up With Chains is simple and profound, the way a pebble on the beach is. There are no song cycles, sample beats, sequencers or baby pictures of the artist as a tot. Ian Svenonius is an inadvertent pioneer. His career has been a studied attempt to advance the history of punk rock, using influences as tools to build with rather than styles to flaunt and discard. - The Wire
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 13:28:02 +0000
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