Rage, Rage Against The Dying Of The Fight

Riley Gale R.I.P

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Since I heard the news I have been blasting Power Trip Nightmare Logic, but then again I probably would have played it anyway, it gets a lot of rotation in 1537 Towers.  I play it if I’m angry, I play it if I want to get angry, I exercise to it, I play it to wake myself the fuck up* and I have played it because the sheer over the top loopy energy of the thing just makes me laugh like a maniac.  For an album so heavy, I play it a lot.

I stumbled across Nightmare Logic through one of the end of 2017 Top 10’s at Mike Ladano’s place and it just stuck.  I really wanted something fast, heavy, committed and inspired.  I got all that in spades with this mob.

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The big fist in ya grill is ‘Executioner’s Tax (Swing Of the Axe)’ and I genuinely don’t think heavy music gets any better than this at all.  Witness this:

The bit that makes my knees go wobbly is the guitar riff at 0:42, it just electrifies me.  The production by Arthur Rizk is superb, there’s a dry, echoing quality to it specially around Gale’s vocals that really sets it apart from anything similar I’d heard.  Heavy as it is what makes it really kick is the tune, in amongst the Riley Gale interviews I’ve watched in the last few days he said that one thing that united the whole band’s disparate musical tastes was love of a good pop tune – you can hear some of that catchiness here.

Nightmare Logic is thrash metal absolutely boiled down to its essence, no frills beyond the odd vocal sample here and there all over and done in 33 minutes.  Significantly Power Trip first debuted on a hardcore punk compilation, thrash has always borrowed heavily from aspects of hardcore but seldom so markedly as this Dallas wrecking crew do.

It’s a brutal affair too, righteously so.  Nightmare Logic is so much better than anything any of the big 4 have put out for fucking decades, this is music as a total release of energy.  Just listen to the belligerent positivity of ‘Waiting Around To Die’ where we are enjoined to rage, rage against the dying of the fight.

The band are absolutely pulverisingly good and I really like the way Chris Ulsh uses a single bass drum, it keeps the sound slightly more rock and roll, more accessible.  There is nothing particularly flash about anyone’s playing here, another punk steal and as a result it ends up being all about the unit; although find me another band who could pull off that simultaneously fast/slow trick from about halfway through ‘If Not Us, Then Who’.

 

In fact if you were looking to encapsulate the band’s philosophy ‘If Not Us, Then Who’ would be it**.  Essentially, there are some seriously shitty forces at large out there – get up and do something about it.  All of Gale’s tales of demons, wars and violence all have a contemporary political relevance and that absolute punker ideology of taking a stand, drawing your line in the sand.  The lyrics are slyly articulate, ‘your logical fallacy is rational savagery‘ and allied to music this powerful I find they really punch home.

Like puppies in a litter it isn’t really fair to pick favourites BUT I have a real thing for the über-mental ‘Firing Squad’, the bristling ‘Waiting Around To Die’ and the manner in which they seemingly compress 20 minutes of musical exposition, depth and texture into the 4:22 of the title track; just like Slayer in their pomp.

 

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Working backwards I found that Nightmare Logic was a big step up from their, already very good, debut Manifest Decimation; the sound compressed, better honed, better targeted.  It saddens me that with Riley Gale now gone we won’t get to hear what they could have done next but I hope that the band are able to push forwards in some manner, they certainly should do.

Get up,
Out of your cave and into the fire
Time’s short, this is our last resort
To get through to you, what have I got to do?
Who’s going to be the difference?
If not us, then who?
If not us, then who?

1021 Down.

PS:  This is good, I really like how everyone in the band are such different people and the breadth of music in there:

*back in those long gone commuter dog days before everything went a bit like the LP cover.

**love the way it echoes Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When? about Jewish partisans in WW2, which was an impactful book for me.  Levi’s title comes from the rabbinical saying ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?’.  If I had longer arms that’s the sort of thing I’d have tattooed down one of them.