hardcorefornerds: HFN 2011 - 4: Raein -...

Donnerstag Dezember 22, 2011 at 0:02

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HFN 2011 - 4: Raein - ‘Costellazione secondo le leggi del caso’, Sulla linea d’orizzonte tra questa mia vita e quella di tutti (released as free download)

Last year, when choosing Vampire Weekend’s Contra as my number one album, I wrote:

“I guess you could say I’m fairly disillusioned with the state of contemporary punk and hardcore, although there is some good stuff out there and it’s not all dead, so forgive me if I put an album by an interesting indie band ahead of something with more more obvious distortion.”

I’m glad to be able to put a punk/hardcore album in my top 5 this year again (if Male Bonding counted last year, which I’m happy enough it did) but largely the same problem remains. There are lots of good small bands, but there don’t seem to be many releases in the genre that really stand out and compete with the more popular forms of ‘alternative’. Maybe this is entirely solipsism on my part, due to moving out of the niche of punk blogs/websites/labels into the mishmash of Tumblr (yeah, I’m blaming you, dear follower!) and the Pitchforkian tyranny of indie is merely a chosen illusion. Yet if it is an illusion, a particularly pernicious aspect of it is the re-labelling of ‘punk’ as a derivative and accessible form of what is in reality (and if you know where to look) not a tired repetition of substandard musicianship, but a vibrant and creative exploration of sonic and cultural limits. Can the same really be said of chillwave, or the pseudocreation of the same?

There’s just a dullness to what is considered acceptable punk these days, to the detriment of making the case for the genre as an ongoing challenge to, well, acceptability. Thus this song gladly makes me want to throw my Fucked Up and Titus Andronicus records out of the window (so, uh, that’s about four in total) as alternatingly tedious and musically insipid. Especially, dear god, Fucked Up: if that’s progressive hardcore, I give up on the idea of progress. By contrast, progress is exactly what this Raein album exemplifies: adapting from several previous solid albums of frenetic Italian screamo the basic percussive sound and layering on top of it a variety of well-produced but still relatively subtle guitar and vocal flourishes. Basically, it’s what Fucked Up would do if they had any style. Instead, it’s Euroscreamo that leads the pack.

The title of this song translates as ‘Constellation following the laws of chance’, that of the album as On the horizon line between my life and that of all, and it’s followed by the track ‘Raein: rumore. Tre’ which means simply ‘Raein: noise. Three’. The translated lyric sheet gives the end of this song as:

“I found you back in the brassware of the mountain, in the compulsiveness of this prayer I only hear “let’s get lost!”,

by digging deeper and deeper with voice, I forgot where I was and where I started from,

I remember, it was here I wanted to be.”

which is almost as impenetrable as the original, although not quite as odd as some of the translations from the Japanese in Envy’s albums. It’s pretty typical of screamo/emo even as sung by English speakers: but I guess, to take a rather blinkered cultural perspective, here its unintelligibility - which in the genre is as much aural as linguistic anyway, so one always has to at least glance at lyric sheets - gives it a quality similar to that of opera. The voice is another instrument, not just an information conduit, although even as such it primarily conveys feelings of anxiety and desperation, release and catharsis. Along with classical beauty, harmony, and the energy of several lungs shouting all at once. It is the theory and practice of punk mixed together.