Sometimes a citizen requires exactly the right music for an occasion. I found the sound on Election Day, topped with a delicious garnish via the band's name: Imperial Triumphant. Here's how this New York noise/metal/jazz trio's "Alphaville" (released this summer) and "Vile Luxury" (2018) locked into the mood of their time.
Fear. Zachary Ilya Ezrin's guitar feels like your guts -- tense, dissonant chords, or arpeggios like a broken bicycle wheel.
Hatred. Ezrin and bassist-keyboardist Steve Blanco growl disgust and inhumanity in classic death-metal vocal style. "The future is bright." "It's time to die."
Conflict. Hisses, drones and "melody" lines butt up against one another yet cohere thanks to Kenny Grohowski's drums, which don't so much keep time as acknowledge time's suspension and provide temporary platforms for combat.
Chaos. Is that a building collapsing? Is that a woman screaming? People run without direction, shouting and waving flags under a shrouded sun.
Violence. The virtuosic, versatile Grohowski pummels you, impales you and rolls you into a ditch. Imperial Triumphant's video for "Swarming Opulence" (below) features a woman stabbing a junkie while he licks her.
Rage. Edgy abstractions rise and subside like predators in tall grass. Hunger and anger belong to the same category of involuntary, uncontainable reaction. Love belongs to that category too, but love took a walk.
Despair. A sick atmosphere of drones and echoes hangs everywhere, waiting for a breeze that never comes. Explosions, yes.
Transcendence. And then . . . jazz. A piano skips like a young goat; a soulful trombone moans from the heart; a horn arrangement ushers the golden memory of Gil Evans into the endless rusting junkyard.
Since we all live in that junkyard, Imperial Triumphant provides a valuable service by turning the junk into art. (Yes, I just returned from a fourth visit to the late Noah Purifoy's Joshua Tree junk-art museum.) And we get a damned entertaining variety show -- a dramatic movie, a psychic cleanse, a sonic bath. The production of "Alphaville" by Trey Spruance (Mr. Bungle) has brought new definition to the canvas of I.T., a band that, though it enjoys the ambiguity of its initials, requires precision to display the full depth of its field. The group even enlisted Meshuggah's Tomas Haake for a taiko drum battle, a highlight that must have delighted Grohowski, who has learned much from the way Haake turns rhythms inside out.
We can't expel all those nasty conditions, or control malicious ignorance. But putting a good frame around them can sure make a voter feel better.
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Watch "Swarming Opulence" here.