Today Is The Day - The temple of terror-noise-metal

“Until now I did not know what terror was: now I know it. It is as if an icy hand were laid upon one's heart. It is as if one's heart were beating itself to death in some empty hollow.” (Oscar Wilde)

“I should have my own hell for wrath, my own hell for pride, – and the hell of caresses; a concert of hells.” (Arthur Rimbaud)

“Attack, act, get your ass off the chair, do something! Today Is The Day is a philosophy, a way of life.” (Steve Austin)

Prologue

You truly understand that music is an outlet once and for all when you discover a band capable of sinking its teeth into reality the way a beast sinks its teeth into a corpse in an advanced state of decay, never letting go. It's something that goes beyond the mere pleasure of listening. Something that concerns life itself, its contradictions, its pain, but also its own undeniable and inexplicable beauty. Steve Austin, born in Michigan in 1966 and later relocated to Nashville, Tennessee, knows this kind of feeling well - he who, in 1992, founded Today Is The Day (destined to become one of the greatest bands in rock history) in order to “walk alone, to go beyond, to love and to hate“, after a phony life, a life as a “small, fat kid grappling with an existence as the black sheep“. An existence utterly overturned by the creation of a fearsome and powerful music, a visceral crossover of sounds always pushed to the edge, with an eye toward the progressive of King Crimson, the raw passion of the Laughing Hyenas, the hard'n'heavy of Black Sabbath, the most extreme death metal, the guitar acrobatics, amid the inferno, of Gregg Ginn, Earache-school grindcore, industrial, and, again, the many incarnations of guru Steve Albini. It's been a long road, fifteen years now, with Austin as the undisputed leader of numerous line-ups and the author of records that are never dull, always different, forever chasing that experimental terror-noise-metal that, to this day, the masterpiece Sadness Will Prevail embodies like no other.

Terror is effective; one way or another, it mutates people's perception of reality.

From that blend of styles and genres, a new world was being coded, but with the class and creative intelligence of those who, without forgetting their sources, looked elsewhere, toward a mutant macro-genre in which one progressively forgot the shore to sail further and further out to sea, toward a form of metal avant-garde streaked with noise (the move toward metal's heaviest, most brutal sounds - death and grindcore - developed in lockstep with an increasing rate of experimentation) drawing on avant-garde techniques and the abstract sublimations of electronics (minimalism, collages of sounds/noise - with a few touches of free-noise delirium -, cinematic samples underlining the grip on a reality impossible to grasp except in its actual transfiguration) to develop an extremely personal discourse. Today Is The Day is a two-faced herm (tradition/avant-garde) that keeps disemboweling all the potential inherent in a ruthless, boundless sound. Today Is The Day is a creature enamored of terror and despair, of rage and pain, transformed into real weapons to stamp out the idiocy and prejudices of American society and of humanity as a whole.

Of epiphanies, aliens and amphetamine reptiles

The son of two Chrysler Corporation factory workers, Steve Austin showed an inclination for music from a very young age. At 12 he already owned a 4-track recorder on which he amused himself recording his first songs; at 14 he built himself a rudimentary recording studio. By his late teens he was already able to play several instruments, though he favored the guitar. Despite all this, though, he was a real whiz at school ("school was my life") and, once enrolled at the University of Missouri, he cut a fine figure, earning very high grades. It took him just two years, however, to blow it all to hell. "I had an epiphany while driving on the highway, coming back from a U2 concert, during the "The Joshua Tree" tour (...) Suddenly it hit me and I found myself outside my car. The wind was blowing hard and cold, and it was as if it went right through me. And I had this feeling, like when you say: "I need to change my life right now!". Said and done! He found a job at a Greek restaurant, worked like crazy and saved up money to buy a decent guitar and a more powerful amplifier with which he could finally throw down the gauntlet to the world. Then he moved to St. Louis because, in the meantime, he'd met some guys with whom he started playing in bands such as Conspiracy and Dorian Gray ("a cross between Jason and the Scorchers and Bauhaus"). At the same time, though, he started growing more and more interested in metal and progressive ("I have a lot of respect for progressive musicians because they really don't care much about mainstream expectations, trying instead to paint a kind of picture with their music"). This is how Mind's Eye came about, though it was short-lived. By then it was time to go back home ("called back by Nascar - the famous auto racing series, ed. - by Daisy Duke, Johnny Cash, Elvis, and his mom..."). Once home, he found refuge in the ranks of Alien In The Land Of Our Birth (with Brad Elrod, drums; Billy Loffler III, guitar; Christopher Frey, bass; Scot Upshaw Carter, vocals), authors of a fascinating blend of post-hardcore, noise and bad lysergic vibrations. Unfortunately, the band left behind nothing but self-released demos (even though they won the 1990 Nashville Music Awards for best avant-garde act), but, with hindsight, tracks like "Father Studio" (galactic post-hardcore), "Box" (the Butthole Surfers going thrash), "Gnawing With Dale" (a crude, crawling tangle of barbaric emotions) and "Life After Slayer" (a devious psychodrama that dissolves on contact with the neuroses of Scratch Acid) prove that this was something more than a mere promise.

Still, Steve soon showed he wasn't entirely keen on the sound of Upshaw Carter & co. ("the band also had space-rock traits and too atmospheric an approach - it was, ultimately, something different from what I was looking for"), eventually leaving the band along with drummer Brad Elrod, who had in the meantime become his close friend (and it's no coincidence that, shortly after, Alien In The Land Of Our Birth, following a disastrous show in Detroit, vanished from the scene for good - Christopher Frey ended up in Porch, Scot Upshaw Carter and Billy Loffler III, God knows where...). With bassist Mike Herrell recruited, in March 1992 Today Is The Day finally became a reality. "I think Today Is The Day - for the moniker I remembered some graffiti on the wall in the basement of the apartment I lived in when I was in Detroit - were the right reward for all my sacrifices. Six years on the road, trying to put together a goddamn band!". It's the self-released EP How To Win Friends And Influence People (1992) that is the first cry of the new creature. The band still shows itself to be green, but talented enough that, in short order, labels like TVT, Earache, Amphetamine Reptile and Alternative Tentacles came calling. "In the end, we went with Amphetamine Reptile [hereafter AmRep, ed.], because we believed it was the label best suited to support us in what we wanted to do". They'd guessed right, because the boss of the Minneapolis label, Tom Hazelmeyer (former guitarist of Halo Of Flies), was from the start a firm believer in the cause. In '93 the official debut finally arrived, albeit in short form. The 7" I Bent Scared features two frantic, extremely noisy tracks, with which the trio seems intent on skipping ahead, scorching the earth in terms of ferocity and performative desperation. The title track and "Come On Down And Get Saved" are thus examples of a sound caught in its infancy, within the womb of a noise tradition that marries the violence of post-hardcore's aftermath. If this is the prelude to their first full-length, it's also true that the tangled plots and precarious structures already look ahead to the emotional, "mathematical" post-metal of Willpower.

Self-portrait of a blind man by the mystic lake

It takes little for "Black Dahlia" to make things clear: Supernova (13 tracks, 53:21), the full-length debut from 1993, is the work of a band already mature and determined to leave nothing untried. Exponential, multi-perspective noise-core, slashed by the vigorous, dissonant lashings of the six-string and anchored to a monumental rhythm section, woven through a web of references whose cardinal points are King Crimson, Black Sabbath and Laughing Hyenas, the sound of Supernova is pervaded by a fiercely subterranean tension that repeatedly destabilizes the already tumultuous, almost agonizing, trajectory of the songs. So, as was said, "Black Dahlia": a disjointed, mutant flow of passion and despair (echoed by the obsessive, maniacal nervous breakdown of "Adult World"), with jazz-noise tears, sudden black-outs and existential whirlpools that in "6 Dementia Satyr" unfold their shadowy contradictions through a constant alternation of jolts and accelerations. Steve's voice is a bottomless well of obscene homicidal urges (somewhere between David Yow and John Brannon), a seditious scream that slams violently against the walls of the soul, again and again, until it tears open; and, while the guitar grinds out oppressive riffs, the whole thing takes on caustic overtones and, via the apocalypses of Fudge Tunnel, traces back to the most indecent and creative post-hardcore. In short, there's psychic anguish and apocalyptic torture in the imminence of the end ("Rise", that is, exasperated demolition, the hammer on the anvil - when it's needed, when there's a need for it). But there's also the science of risk-taking, the rationality of extermination, as when the game of mirrors becomes dizzying and elusive in "Silver Tongue", where the interpenetration of avant-garde (dissonances on the loose, a conclave of voices, piano descents en passant) and expressive power (sudden hyper-thrash tornadoes) reaches one of the album's first peaks.

To really shake up the scene, then, you need to play the card of eclecticism, put yourself in a privileged position, surprise others and surprise yourself. It's the instrumental tracks, then, that dig the real divide between the trio and the rest of the breathless pack chasing after them. "Blind Man At Mystic Lake" (psychedelic glissando and a mechanical, ascending music box, haunted by the souls of the dead still babbling nonsense nobody wants to hear anymore), "The Begging" (the soundscape of a technological world prey to gothic romanticism), "Timeless" (asteroids streaking across the sky-brain) and "The Guilt Barber" (frippertronics decomposed into a futurist kaleidoscope of distorted timbres and modulated feedback) stand there, then, proving that the gamble was worth it, that Hazelmeyer had a hell of a good ear, that redemption doesn't come only through extreme outbursts, but also requires a certain dose of structural intelligence. The brutal lashings of "The Kick Inside" (traces of which we'll find again, nine years later, in "The Descent") set the stage for the filthy chaos into which, inevitably, everything plunges: the tendrils of death that tickle us, the seismic jolts that reduce the body to pure self-destructive instinct. It's one of the album's high points, the moment stretched to excess of a life heading toward its end, without flaunting heroism, without harboring illusions of salvation, indeed scattering its echo among a flock of bleating sheep and the sweet, nauseating melody of some forgotten, cheap music box...

Fittingly, then, “Goose Is Cooked” follows with a mortuary piece, all black holes and tentacular distensions, which, in a temporal short circuit, dresses Eyehategod in the ghostly rags of Khanate, a decade before its escape from the asylum. The experimental high point of the record, “Self Portrait” is, finally, the self-portrait of an artist extraordinarily over the top: a scant ten minutes that lines up, one after another, Peter Green/Jerry Garcia in a free-jazz wonderland and the final push toward the finish line, with a banner raised high in the sky: power is nothing without control…

The rave reviews are too many to count, but rather than resting on their laurels, the band sets off on the Clusterfuck Tour (43 dates across the States) alongside Chokebore and Guzzard, an event immortalized by the Ep Clusterfuck '94, which finds the band tackling, among other things, the unreleased “Hand And Knees” (jazz-core and colossal tectonic jolts) and “Pipedream Zero” (a grotesque tête-à-tête between the Penguin Café Orchestra and a band of drunken zombies).

“Live, straight from the heart…”

The period in which Willpower (1994; 9 tracks, 30:24) was recorded ushered in one of the most tormented stretches of Steve's life. “I found it so hard to be happy, to feel good, to enjoy life. So I chose the “fucking chemical road”: nothing matters to you when you feel there's no way out of the tunnel.” Add to all this the violent death of his father (in a car accident) and you have, in full, the stage on which the emotional tragedy of the band's first masterpiece plays out, in nine acts.

Willpower is math-metal played with blood in the eyes, the lucid boiling of pain contemplated with inhuman coldness, the act of self-control pushed to its extreme consequences, against the rising ruins of the psyche, daily tempted to do us in. In its formal perfection, this record proves, should anyone have doubts, that suffering and anguish are the greatest fuel for that pestilent illusion we call art. The tension that shook Supernova from top to bottom is here refracted and radicalized (clear signs of this are the even more unpredictable dynamics and the volume shifts that accompany the unfolding of the various tracks), even as sudden melodic blooms let the music breathe, as if swept by a brand-new psychedelic vitalism. But it's a psychedelia run through bleach, disfigured with poison: “To me, it's an acid-metal sound,” Steve would reveal. The leap is also completed toward the furious, exhausting vocal tragedy of Brannon (revered ever since he lent his throat to the derailing hardcore outfit Negative Approach), so much so that even in the most “relaxed” vocal passages, one senses, alive and burning like fire under ash, a sense of imminent disintegration.

The title-track is born from a collapse (“I look into your eyes and I know that you're lying,” a woman screams at her man…) and hits you in the face like a fist, severe and merciless. The band has grown, you can tell right away: Steve traces diagonal lines of metallic fury (voracious distortions, agitated minimalisms and lightning vanishing points keep him balanced between Gregg Ginn and the precipice of psychedelic post-core) and howls like a stoned leper; Brad pounds geometrically and precisely, underlining the arteries of the drama; Mike holds the whole thing together with a devilish walking bass. The development is narrative, proceeding in jolts but tending toward a climax, toward a confession, now clearly suffered, almost self-extorted with all possible force: “I don’t want you/ because I need someone/ ‘till the day we die”; and, all around, the decompression taking place: strings absent-mindedly caressed, skins carefully tuned, an anemic, breathless melodic yearning… You'd choose resignation, you'd never pry your ass off the chair again, you'd flush that philosophy, that way of living, down the drain. But, as we know, moments of surrender are made to be overturned, to be stripped to the bone by vindication, by the vile bitterness that grinds up the bluesy riff that opens “My First Knife”. Then, the apocalypse, good for pushing through the crowd, telling the world “son of a bitch”, reclaiming memories, tearing down time. “I wish you were with me/ instead of far away” is the couplet of a man now stripped of shame, a male reduced to a puppet, good at best as a stand-in for himself for a refrain that returns like a poorly disguised cry: in between, splitting the epic in two, violent mathematical ferments and a guitar screeching boundlessly as in a Sonic Youth/Rapeman bacchanal, but with the discipline imposed by the Crimson King and the voice of a caged beast drooling adrenaline…

But that same riff, that same swagger, is found filthy, deformed and brutalized in “Nothing To Lose”. The canon is now reversed: from melody to din, from (apparent) resignation to assault without restraint. It's the drums that frame the field (a dizzying, self-satisfied roll), the bass its loyal hound; but it's the guitar that defends the borders, distorting the wrath of God albeit with a strange, degraded intellectual stance. Notice, then, this passage: no longer the tortured heaviness of Supernova, the distortion pedal in a maniac's hands, but the cynical, pseudo-rational use (the study…) of violence and disdain. How much repressed malice, then, how much despair forced, kicking and screaming, into the confines of release when “Golden Calf” kicks in! It's the dying Scratch Acid, dejectedly entrusting their last memories to the malignant murmur of the demon we all carry inside. Except that murmur then turns into an absolute desire for life: the post-punk spirals of the bass, the epic crescendo of guitar and drums, the words freed with a weakened voluptuousness… With the in medias res intro of “Sidewinder” we're in the thick of noise-metal dehumanized by technology. The structural complications (successive degrees of emotional fracture), the interlude like a dim light barely illuminating the actor on the empty stage of a nonexistent theater, the sublimation crushed under the weight of an overflowing, rabid creativity. On Willpower, Today Is The Day play emo-progressive, assembling it from the wreckage of noise-metal.

“Many Happy Returns” has delirium in its veins, the effervescence of inner collapse, because pushing everything to the limit is the inevitable consequence of frustrations we don't know how to handle. The opening is astonishing, the development superior and unmatchable: a spasmodic engine of cruel screams, guitar whirlwinds, rhythmic patterns disabled bit by bit, brutal collapses in your face, dissonant dispersions flung beyond the hurdle. You can't take much more of this. And then, the melody you don't expect, the ephebic falsetto, the almost swooning rapture of a “Simple Touch” that marks the band's melodic peak. Perfect, even though unexpected (or maybe precisely because of that?), before the final descent of “Promise Land”, again introduced by a cinematic sample. At first, it seems to want to play the definitive requiem, to put an end to things, almost stumbling over its own notes and words; but Willpower is a record of constant metamorphoses, of sudden swerves, of clean, unappealable cuts. So, if the way out is paved with timeless images, cradled as if in a Green-ian dream/nightmare where the hymn “Amazing Grace” lives again, the approach of the end deserves one more lash of the caged beast's tail. Afterwards, even silence won't be the same. (1)

Recording Willpower was like playing live, straight from the heart…

The death march toward the black iron prison

Steve Austin is certainly not one to dip his toes in the same river twice. His music is a continuous flow of ideas, an inextricable web of intuitions, a constant search in which life and art merge seamlessly. His lyrics bear witness to this: a logbook from which, held up to the light, emerge the contours of a deeply restless soul, yet no less eager to fight in the open, to always, in any case, question itself. This drive toward the new is certainly also fueled by his passion for jazz, especially in its “free” variant: “The creativity of free-jazz is like that of free verse: always fluctuating and changing; in short, never play the same thing twice!”

Having said that, though, before entering the studio to record their self-titled third album, the impulse toward change was provided by a completely accidental event: the departure of Mike Herrell. “After Mike left us, Brad and I had a lot of trouble finding a worthy replacement. The search was so difficult that, in the end, we opted for a completely different approach, because for us it was unthinkable to carry on in that vein without Mike's crazy way of playing. So we called up a friend of ours [Scott Wexton, ed.] who played “evil keyboards”, although, after a couple of tours, we realized that things between us weren't exactly going great.” (2) Despite the personality clashes, though, Today Is The Day (1996; 12 tracks, 36:43), their first record to be recorded in Steve's own private studio – the Austin Enterprise – in Nashville, is yet another towering example of hallucinated creativity: the center of gravity shifts toward a sound that, already stylistically altered by the absence of bass and the presence of keyboards and sampling, sails toward a digitalization of the noise-metal-progressive hybrid developed up to that point. The timbres, the shades, the tonalities end up appearing deformed by a lens of painful, caustic glacial coldness. And yet this de-humanized wasteland is continually shaken by cruel emotions, so much so that the contrast between icy surface and burning depths seems to dust off the lesson of Iceburn (nomen omen…) and transfer it into an alien, vaguely gothic dimension, following the deep furrow of an avant-metal that is as noisy as it is refined in its exasperated expressive contrasts, made even more infernal by the increasingly cruel distortion of the voice and the skillful use of ambient-industrial textures.

And so, “Kai Piranha” and “Realization”, channeling death-metal inside a rigid mechanical structure (the first drawing from Voivod, the second joining hands with early Neurosis and Black Sabbath), anticipate the impenetrable heaviness of In The Eyes Of God and the disturbing, stunning claustrophobia of Sadness Will Prevail. In this sense, letting past and future collide violently before pushing its targets even further, this work represents an essential point of passage for the band's sonic development. Into the darkness of the thickest madness, instead, sinks “Marked”, whose coda lights the fuse of a chaotic, yet glorious, tornado of abominable screams and barbaric noise-anarchy. It's the record's definitive climax, reached in the short span of a few minutes after the start, making clear, in short, that no quarter is given around here. Everything is fickle, subject to the laws of change (exempting only the acoustic sketch of “A Man Of Science” and the aching mini-ballad “I Love My Woman”), driven by an unconscious force to push further, toward ever harder goals. So, if “Bugs – Death March” takes off like a rocket with a vicious one-two of grim grindcore, then working with the chisel of jazz-metal neurosis, before long it ends up tearing open the horizon with a vessel of the dispossessed already beyond the pillars of Hercules (“The sky is black / The fire is coming down”), all underscored by malevolent gusts of keyboards and destined to squander its own recklessness within the folds of a spectral, impalpable world, like the one evoked by the esoteric ritual of “Black Iron Prison”.

Free cacophonies and progressive interlockings shake rock-solid constructions like “Mountain People”; existential abysses carve the simulacrum of anguish into the folds of “Ripped Off”; “She Is In Fear Of” walks the edge of the cruelest neurosis, while in “Dot Matrix” a thread of voice tears down the border between human and demonic, reaching worryingly psychotic levels. But, more than any other, it's probably “The Tragedy” where this icy, digitalized sound flows into something truly unprecedented, arriving, without mincing words, at the record's true sonic essence: the point of contact is staged by a rhythmic conveyor belt against which (or on which…) the guitar figures run, filtered through Wexton's electronic devilry. It's the “industrial-oriented” vision of a science-fiction avant-garde metal. The clearest prophecy of the “terrible” sound of Sadness Will Prevail.

In the temple of the man who loved to hurt himself

With the AmRep chapter closed, it's Philadelphia's Relapse Records that welcomes Today Is The Day into the fold. The move, of course, isn't without consequences for the band's sound. Starting with Temple Of The Morning Star (1997; 17 tracks, 50:52 – the title comes from the name of a Satanic Church in Denver, Colorado), the seeds of the extreme, experimental metal that had, up to that point, had to share the stage with the noise-core leanings on which the band had largely built its legend finally come fully to the surface. But that shift operates only on the surface, because this is above all the record where everything the band had learned up to that moment reaches, for the first time, a staggering level of synthesis, one to which the production lends a visionary, almost darkly mystical compactness. The oppressive heaviness of Supernova, the psychic tension of Willpower and the destabilizing use of electronics that had weighed so heavily on its self-titled predecessor all converge into a granite, crushing block of brutality and torment.

Once again, the line-up gets turned upside down. Initially, the choice for bassist fell on Jason Dietz, whose cousin, Mark Hyde, was later chosen as drummer. "Steve already had some songs ready before I joined. Once I was in the band, we tried out numerous drummers. Of course, the final decision was up to Steve, but after many failed attempts, I eventually decided to get in touch with my cousin Mark Hyde, who passed the audition! Meanwhile, Steve had told us that Christopher Reeser would be handling keyboards. While we were starting to record the song demos, I was forced to leave the band, though, since the other band I played in (Serotonin) was about to go on tour right around that time: the members of that band were like brothers to me, so I had no choice." Reeser himself stepped in to replace Dietz: "Chris took my place, as 'bassist' – Dietz continues. Though I could be wrong... but I've always had the impression that all he did was sample my bass lines from the demos with the keyboards. So the 'bass' you hear on the record is nothing but the sound of 'my' bass, sampled..."

In any case, with the new lineup, the sound takes on a mighty impact (like Zeni Geva made even grimmer in the face of everyday collapse), with Hyde's drumming (which had the tough job of not making anyone miss Elrod, "the most talented and creative drummer Today Is The Day ever had", in the words of Marshall Kilpatric) decidedly at the forefront, and Steve's guitar razor-sharp and obsessive in repeatedly tearing open these infernal blocks of grieving dismay. Hyde recalls: "We rehearsed the songs for a whole month, 6-8 hours a day. In the studio (inside a shitty, cracked-up warehouse) it was brutally hot. But that atmosphere helped us pull sick, twisted snapshots out of our minds." Snapshots that forever capture a deep conflict between form and content, between emotions, solemn and brutal ("it's as if we'd stripped ourselves of our own souls, simultaneously!"; "Temple is made of suicidal emotions, fear, love, death...", Steve specifies), and the discipline of the sound, paroxysmal and indestructible ("Temple is precision metal – Hyde adds – which is why, as you rightly point out, the rhythm section takes center stage in a completely unprecedented way; as a drummer, I wanted to push the band to a new level, toward a new dimension – and I hope I managed it!").

In short, the path that Temple Of The Morning Star sets out on looks hungrily toward the future, even though the band makes no effort to hide that it's a road strewn with obstacles, paved with abjection and unspeakable obscenities. Hence the justification for an "aesthetics of terror" as the one true way to corner the most unfathomable fears of the spirit. In the effort to enter the "temple of the morning star", the artist discovers – must necessarily discover! – first the darkest paths of the psyche, tearing apart any trace of resignation and staging, beyond himself as well, his own damned struggle for survival.

"I can't be what you want me to be/ I am dead": that's the first truth revealed. Fittingly, it's contained in the title-track, placed at the start with its hymn-like shimmer riding a bed of percussion. From there, it's a relentless, nagging procession of shattered images, starting with "The Man Who Loves To Hurt Himself", whose intro is already unsettling: a Johnny Cash d'antan (grappling with Waylon Jennings' "Good Hearted Woman") overwhelmed by restless electronic ghosts – as if to say: one's own land, and everything that keeps it from being remembered clearly and peacefully. We're elsewhere, then; we immediately recognize the wanderer's metaphor. In the liner notes, Steve confirms his own dark affliction, appearing, in the photo featured inside the booklet, bearded and with a look somewhere between grim and vengeful: he's his own Charles Manson, a psychopath determined to dig bare-handed through his own muck. "The man who loved to hurt himself" has an astonishing ferocity once that aborted tribute is set aside and he screams his words amid a futuristic cataclysm. And it's a furious spectacle of darting guitar lines gleaming like steel in liquid darkness, clusters of fluidifying rhythmic pickaxe blows, pre-apocalypse grandeur at the mercy of the desperate and the forgotten. "(Temple Of The Morning Star) is a human experience: any supernatural dimension to it is only incidental. It's a bit like the Waco massacre (in Texas; ed.): it's about human relationships, in the face of an idea of faith. If there's faith in that record, it's the faith of someone who believes in himself. Temple Of The Morning Star is a declaration of independence."

"Blindspot" opens with a bassline carved in marble. It's a flawless machine: precision, power, grandiloquence. An embrace that's both cerebral and physical, further dissected and reassembled by the terrible vision that follows, "High As The Sky" (In The Eyes Of God is already taking shape in Steve's mind...), with relentless vocal thrusts and towering instrumental counterpoints unleashing wild, truculent, unspeakable instincts. In "Miracle", the outrage sets about destroying these rock-solid bodies from the inside out: electronics strip the living flesh of the sound bare, the music estranges itself into inhuman dissonances, digression becomes a tool of tormented purification: "Dying Blood bath Spiritual Physical Emotional Sexual Chemical Miracle"... The desire to be elsewhere coexists with the pull toward suicide: or maybe, quite simply, they're the same thing ("Kill Yourself"). The plea for protection, the hopeless weeping, the distant screams: feeble provocations against a reality made of incomprehensible symbols. From dark electric folk to a perilous descent toward the most hidden depths of Evil: "Mankind" is a metaphor for a humanity doomed to its own destruction, to the sacrilege of its very nature. It's a tortured ascent, an endless torment that reaches its dramatic peak in the moral filth of "Pinnacle", a martial long take of exasperated, exasperating pornography, the fierce spit before the final, decisive loss of all divinity:

“Watch me destroy you/ Get out of my path/ I fucked your wife/ Fucked her in the ass/ She loved it/ She sucks me/ That’s really funny/ Suck me/ You fucker/ I hate you/ You’re nothing…/ (…)/ My ass bleeds for you/ Sincerely“.

It's a postcard from hell: with love. And yet, in this contemporary via crucis, everything makes sense on its own terms. The percussive deluge, the deformed voices, the sulfurous atmosphere of "Crutch" are nothing, then, but the inevitable explosion following the last, deflagrating psychological decompression. Afterwards, things seem to favor other paths, aim at new horizons, only seemingly less furious and shocking in outlining that incurable torment. A meditative aura pervades the painful psychodrama of "Roots Of All Evil", unlike "Satan Is Alive", which is pure blasphemous hallucination. Later, when "Rabid Lassie" kicks in, you get something like a sense of rebirth, of briefly reclaiming your own life. It's like when, after falling into a ditch, you get back up, dust yourself off, and start walking again. You're battered, sure, but you're back on your own two feet. As for everything else, why should it matter, when, after all, the air is still so heavy? "My Life With You" confirms as much within a few minutes, framed by the instrumentals "Friend For Life" (a very quick glance toward the East...) and "I See You" (a desolate twilight of acoustic guitar and prospective synth), which show how this second half tries, one way or another, to redeem the overall character of the record. The fact remains that, reckoning with the last two movements, not much hope manages to survive intact. "Hermaphrodite" casts a menacing shadow with its gargantuan eight-plus minutes of majestic Melvins-esque slow-doom, driven by a venomous bassline and gutted by the guitar's acidic stiletto jabs. The electric reprise of the title-track closes things out in grand style: circular/airborne drumming, guitar fumes spread like an oppressive veil in the background, and that refrain, "I can't be what you want me to be / I am dead", in which the word "dead", spat out with all possible contempt, becomes the epitome of a cursed record, destined to leave its mark across the entire heavy music scene.

Also in 1997, the band took part (with a cover of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath", later included on the reissue of Temple Of The Morning Star as a hidden track) in Hydra Head's project paying tribute to Black Sabbath with a series of six 7" covers. Among the other bands who took on the legendary English band's repertoire were, besides Coalesce (co-billed on the split In These Black Days, vol. 3), Anal Cunt, Eyehategod, Converge, Brutal Truth and Neurosis.

In the eyes of God, traces of the black angel

The new Today Is The Day record will be completely different from the records I've made up to now. It's an extension of the sound, of the heaviness of Temple Of The Morning Star, with songs – averaging a couple of minutes or so in length – that hit like lashes of madness. It's also a longer album: 20 songs, with no instrumentals, (...) written in just a month, together with the drummer. I think it's one of the most futuristic heavy metal records ever made.

So said Steve (who had meanwhile relocated to Clinton, Massachusetts) shortly before the release of In The Eyes Of God (1999; 20 tracks, 50:38), the fifth album of his personal saga. Echoing him was the ad campaign put together by Relapse, which, in apocalyptic tones, declared: "If the end of the world comes with the new millennium, In The Eyes Of God will be humanity's funeral." The usual millenarian predictions turned out, fortunately, to be wrong, but with its thunderous grindcore charge, its "lashes of madness" and its most venomous outpourings of hatred, the Nashville crew's new record was yet another assault with bladed weapons, another display of strength and terrifying musical clarity.

Having replaced Hyde and Reeser with Bill Kelliher (bass) and Brann Dailor (drums), both coming from Lethargy, Steve renews his challenge to the world by looking to one of his favorite bands, Napalm Death (though the influence of Carcass is clearly felt too). But the band's unbridled eclecticism keeps the grind-core attack from being anything close to blind, enriched as it is, besides a vaguely gothic atmosphere, by an endless series of rhythmic jolts, instrumental passages and open structures. The evolutionary line running from Temple Of The Morning Star all the way to Sadness Will Prevail finds, in these mighty fifty minutes, a crucial point of reconnaissance: much of its successor's devastating power is already foreshadowed here, in all its sharp, corrosive force. A power that draws, among other things, on even more personal lyrics ("these lyrics are comparable to those of Willpower, though there's a higher metaphorical level at play"), in which Good and Evil blend together with no escape ("just as the cover image represents the inseparable union of Christ and the Devil, in the same way a real man should be capable of representing a mixture of good and evil...").

If the title track stirs up chaos with its ferocious lashings, it's the long "Going To Hell" (opened by a soprano's melancholy singing and sent off in glory by a long, sweeping coda) that stands as the first truly devastating proof that the band's inspiration is still operating at the highest level. Right after come the grind testosterone of "Spotting An Unicorn", the grotesque horror-death of "Possession", the murderous frenzy of "The Color Of Psychic Power", the martial black sabbath of "Soldier Of Fortune" and the bestial charge of "Mayari" and "Bionic Cock". The great dynamism of these tracks is sharpened, besides the relentless work of guitar and bass, also (and perhaps above all) by Dailor's superb, quasi-jazzy drumming (take, for instance, "Argali", with its sudden branchings and liberating escalations; or "Afterlife", with its almost math-rock solutions). "Brann is an exceptional drummer. He's always in control of the situation and manages to be everywhere at once with his drumming" (Mark Hyde). That all of this grew out of a compositional dialogue between guitar and drums (for a long time, Steve and Brann had no bassist at all) is proven by certain passages where the two instruments travel face to face, both marking time while the bass works away like a chisel underground.

After the brutal back-and-forth of "Daddy", it's time to check just how far the sound born amid the folds of Supernova ("Who Is The Black Angel") has traveled, to follow its voluptuous descents into murky depths or monitor its anguish as it marches, anthem-like, into psychotic labyrinths ("Martial Law"). In "False Reality", dizzying surges light up the hardcore side of a sound that, while drawing on the most disparate genres, continues to come across as an alien hybrid, an intensely personal mix where the sum of the parts produces a result that's incredibly original, and where, moreover, the eclecticism is anything but forced, representing instead a genuine artistic necessity. No wonder, then, if an Oriental-flavored dance intro leads into another of their pulverizing bloodbaths ("The Russian Child Porn Ballet"), while the sense of disorientation and frustration grows and the geometry seems to reveal the secret behind so much fury ("The Cold Harshness Of Being Wrong Throughout Your Entire Life"). Just as happened with the opening, the band operates on two levels for the finale too. So while "Honor", with its epic charge and driving harmonization, represents the ideal peak of the record, it's really the long suite of "There Is No End" that marks its outer limit, with a chameleonic succession of metallic ferocity, Fripp-esque progressive rock (chaos and reason) and dark Native American dances wrapped in a digital shell.

There is no end, indeed. With this track, in fact, Steve is already reaching toward the immediate future, leaving more than one door open and raising a thousand questions. In the meantime, though, with its frenzied sonic twists and turns, In The Eyes Of God already presented itself as a work capable of sustaining multiple readings. And yet, once its mystery is unlocked, it starts to show its "human" face, and its symbolism, scattered into a thousand streams, slowly flows back to its source, illuminating the overall meaning of a neurotic, furious and, once again, important record.

In constant flux…

Once the In The Eyes Of God tour wrapped up, Steve set out to find new members. At a Slayer show, he was approached by Chris Debari (ex-Somniis), who suggested they jam together sometime. “That's how I discovered Chris was a talented guitarist, as well as a very smart guy. We became friends right away and stayed in touch for a while. Later, when I needed a bassist, I thought of him.” That was January ‘99. The drummer slot, however, was still an open question: “I was looking for one through ads online, and one day Marshall Kilpatric got in touch with me. I had him come to my studio and he won us over in no time.” The new line-up's first field test came with the split Zodiac Dreaming (2001), shared with Californians 16. The new trio unveiled early versions of “Invincible” and “Breadwinner”. A year earlier, meanwhile, Live ‘Till You Die had come out, a live document for die-hard fans featuring tracks from performances between 1997 and 2000. The atmosphere is claustrophobic (“Crutch” is the kind of thing that calls for immediate hospitalization), the performances are loaded with malice, and the band proves itself to be, on stage, a true war machine. But the real gem lies in the cover versions: “Feel Like Makin’ Love” (Bad Company), “Wicked Game” (Chris Isaak) and “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road” (Beatles), all forced to endure the Today Is The Day (mal)treatment. In acoustic form, we also find, among others, the theme from “Temple Of The Morning Star” (with percussion and a hint of drooling synth). Finally, the unreleased “TDA” is an instrumental caught between ambient and spacey stretches.

The following year, the band shared another split, Descent (this time with Metatron), bolstered by the horrendous black hole of “Tabula Rasa”, poised between deformed vocals, noise-rock magma, and shreds of dissolute memories that attempt an improbable redemption with a weird-folk coda (!).

Flowers made of flesh. Or, the advent of despair

Everything has a meaning. Even in the life of an artist as controversial as Steve Austin. In seven years of activity, the man from Nashville had done nothing but lay himself bare, often revealing his own vulnerability amid the raging of music that defied classification on many levels. As the one fixed point of a band increasingly respected by audiences (admittedly a niche one) and critics (certainly the most enlightened ones), Steve surrounded himself with people always willing to give their all, because he himself would give his all, despite his paranoia and his ambiguities. And yet, it was as if he were always isolated, as if he were trying to shield himself from someone or something. He had pulled himself out of a terrible depression thanks to his new partner, Hannah, who later became his wife. But, even though he now had two children as well, the marks left by the monster were still inside him… So, for what many consider his most important record, he wanted all the space he needed to show, once and for all, the full extent of his fears and anguish.

Sadness Will Prevail (2002; 30 tracks, 145:02): a double album, just shy of two and a half hours of music. A monument to the irrationality of his soul. A powerful, unsparing portrait of a man's anxieties, despair, and pain. “I think it's one of the most insane testimonies to the loneliness of our time. Our lives are unfolding in increasingly isolated ways. All these cutting-edge means of communication make us less and less human, more and more alienated.” And, further: “The idea came to me around 2000. I was locked up in my apartment and felt a bit like Jack Nicholson in Shining, ready to kill every member of my family. It was like a trap: I couldn't escape, and meanwhile I was trying to understand what was going on deep down in my feelings. (…) So, in that state of mind, I wrote most of the songs. Songs that are genuine introspection.” A continuous excavation, then, pushed to extremes through the use of exhausting repetitions, as if searching for the master key to a regenerative, therapeutic minimalism. Certainly, a weapon used to make the message (“sadness will prevail”) crystal clear, unassailable. “While the previous record had tried to push past the limits of speed and sonic aggression,” explains Kilpatric, “Sadness, rather than being a conventional record, should be regarded more as an exorcism. Although all the elements that had progressively built up the Today Is The Day sound were there, Sadness… is a deliberately ‘minimalist’ work. And if the repetitive passages serve to keep endlessly repeating to the world that ‘sadness will prevail’, in the end you know that, right in that very moment, you'll also have the chance, if you want it, to feel alive again… That's why this record is also full of sarcasm and black humor…”

But, so to speak, while the message is more or less clearly defined, the medium proves to be as tortuous as ever, full of uncertainties, often forced to wander without direction. Just as the previous records had shown a more or less deliberate formal cohesion (with the undisputed peak being Willpower), in the same way, but from a completely different angle, Sadness… honors imperfection, sanctifies incoherence, laying out a jungle of tortured, pounding sounds, a web of shifting dynamics tasked with the thankless job of chasing after an (apparently) undecipherable emotional vortex. This also explains the choice to record everything live, with only minor post-production touches afterward: preserving the truthfulness of the performance itself, without too many frills.

If the previous record was loaded with rage and hatred, Sadness Will Prevail is pure madness, pure psychosis.

So, in this grand portrait of spirits trapped in a corner, huddled with their faces twisted in horror, everything is viscerally pushed to its most extreme consequences, amid an atmosphere of irredeemable moral decay. As one ventures further into this contemporary “dark wood”, it becomes clear that the artist is not alone, no longer left to fend for himself with his burden of feelings, but almost forced, instead, to drag his fellow travelers along with him, out of sheer necessity, out of an overabundance of inspiration. “In retrospect,” Kilpatric continues, “I realize that on that record we were all forced to kill off a piece of our soul. We had to dig into the darkest corners of consciousness to keep up, and I think the music, in that sense, is revealing.” In short, if this is a record that wounds, it's because, first and foremost, it springs from deep wounds, widely shared ones. And so the performance – chaotic, impure, formless – transcends mere musical execution, transforming into a metaphor for something else. Elsewhere, then, one pushes further, in search of a higher meaning. And the metal shell remains only as a point of contact with the outside world, as a relatively recognizable signal of a sound that keeps devouring itself, swallowing, at the same time, everything that can serve the cause. “Sure, Sadness is undoubtedly a ‘metal’ record, but if you listen to it properly, you realize it's not confined within that fence, because, for instance, it could also be seen as an ‘extreme’ version of The Wall by Pink Floyd. In fact, it's a thoroughly ‘progressive’ record” (Marshall Kilpatric).

The spectrum of solutions widens, then. Alongside the classic guitar-bass-drums combo (seasoned, as we now know, with electronics, samples and keyboards), a piano appears, along with the acoustic and electric violin of Kris Force (Amber Asylum), the electric cello of Jackie Gratz (Amber Asylum), the electronic devilry of Wrest (Leviathan), the electric guitar of Mark Morton (Lamb Of God), and the voice of Seth Putnam (Anal Cunt). Guest appearances that open up new horizons, literally blowing the sound apart and placing the record in a dimension that is, at once, parallel to and “other” than its predecessors.

Every step in life is a step toward death,

and memory is nothing but a trace of nothingness

(Emil Cioran)

X and Y: that's what the two records are called. Two sides of the same coin. Complementary precisely because they push in two different directions. The first, a mass of homicidal rage, “an assault on your senses”; the second, a transposition of that same rage into something “vaguely surreal”. The result is one shock after another, punctuated by apparent oases where murky semblances of placid resignation take shape.

The ambush of “Maggots And Riots”, right at the opening, is the kind you don't forget: acrobatic/geometric sludge-metal erupting with bestiality from every pore, perfect for warning off the half-hearted, drawing the circle around the true faithful, hurling the brain onto the pavement of obscenity. Steve's voice is pushed to its absolute limit: what's left of John Brannon, amid the flames of hell, needled by the most ruthless and unforgiving demons. We are, no point dancing around it, isolated; all around, the rubble of civilization, in the grip of technology's ghosts: “Criminal” (introduced by the sound of a modem connecting) is an indictment of “people online who spew one load of bullshit after another, without an ounce of truth. We can't feel truly ‘connected’ to each other this way!” And so the modem sound explodes into a suffocating blanket of gargantuan stoner-death, gutted by outboard prog-math of disconcerting precision. It's the sound of extermination. A hymn to redemptive scorn. The blasphemous art of excess. Postmodern grand guignol. Everything smashes head-on, fucking relentlessly, into its own limit: piercing shrieks tear through the canvas, spilling into orientalizing shadows, behind harsh-noise screens, which a satanic, surgical grind promptly helps to mock (“Distortion Of Nature”). A dangerous, illogical, revitalizing game…

The warning is already clear: there are nightmares to endure before the light — assuming one can even track down and withstand its splendor. In the here and now, then, "Butterflies" reigns supreme with its foul inner catastrophes. Seth Putnam's screams are the center of gravity of a shattered freak-show, crucified in the void. The circular drumming, the hypnotic piano, those fake metallic confetti like crazed insects are the building blocks of an oppressive, entombing stage set. Without a doubt, one of Steve's greatest masterpieces ("I remember that, while I was writing it, I imagined it as the transfiguration of a mythical garden with butterflies and bees fluttering all around..."). Split into two halves, "Crooked" is first an inexorable march led by a deranged preacher, then a conveyor belt on which composition and decomposition overlap until they blur together. The play of repetition also takes on progressive shades in "Unearthed" and "The Descent", though it's especially in the latter that the bond between the complex rhythmic structures laid down by the rhythm section and the Fripp-ian guitar tours de force (think, for example, of "Lark's Tongue In Aspic (pt. II)") reveals itself in all its splendor of synthesis (connections and annexations) and transcendence (in the mechanics of abandonment and ecstasy, there is ever more room for emotional overspill and stratification, while sonic symbols pile up like residue from some latent time — Willpower, Temple Of The Morning Star, etc. — despite everything). Solemnity has here taken on the trappings of degeneration (the prog-death-core dynamite of "Invincible" — with its desperate, expressionistically overwrought coda — rattles and stupefies, further poisoning the already murky waters of In The Eyes Of God), of hallucinated grotesquerie (the rollercoaster glissandos of the horror-dance "Face After The Shot"), so much so that it's no longer a utopia to imagine a parallel universe where Black Sabbath play with the terroristic disgust of the early Swans, while a sample from "Paradise Lost 2" is broken apart into a thousand, spermatic trails ("Christianized Magick").

In this game of indirect quotation, the Slint-like intro to "The Nailing" (which then unfolds like a dazed and diabolical ballad) proves once again that achieving a credible, realistic avant-metal requires both a committed gaze toward the past and a futurist bent free of pointlessly destructive urges. On the classicizing side, however, this incarnation of Today Is The Day can be sincerely austere, albeit with all due caveats. Starting with "Death Requiem", piano and strings stitch together an example of two-faced chamber music: tragic and funereal, but also, in turn, schizoid and eccentric, with the voice furiously chasing — in a maddened whirl — the accelerating flow of notes. Over rarefied, reassuring backdrops, "Voice of Reason: Vicious Barker" instead opens up, while "Mistake" and "Aurora" serve as true interludes (in the latter, the symphonic spirit rises titanically to underline the approach of the album's first great climax). But it's "The Ivory Of Self-Hate" that marks the high point of this clash between classicism and avant-garde, with its tormented tribal-mechanical gait, its projected vocal echoes, the detached elegance of the violin, and the turmoil of magmatic depths. And here, finally, is the great maelstrom (the first one) of the title track: a fatalistic, grandiloquent cry of hope/submission, to which the manipulation of malignant shrieks lends a meaning anything but liberating, even viewed from a wholly negative standpoint.

But once you put on Y, you realize that everything starts over from scratch, that there has been no redemption, and that, if anything, the level of perversion — moral and artistic — has yet to reach its peak. The assembly proceeds in an even more indecipherable way, and even if one wanted to trace an underlying structure, perhaps to speak knowledgeably of a concept, one would first have to reckon with statements like this one: "I want to bring my music to a 'primal' level; in short, I want to express my ideas and emotions without being coherent." One recalls, then, that this babel of ideas and revelations is nothing but the metaphor of a soul more than ever at the mercy of itself. Mirroring what "Maggots And Riots" did, "Myriad" thus opens the second half of the record with the terrorist assault of a monolithic, mechanical death-core. "In many passages of our songs, all the instruments play in unison, producing what I call 'total unity'." But this unidirectional drive finds its reason for being precisely because the band is always willing to let itself be seduced by the sulfurous vortex of anarchy (the free-industrial chasms of "Spaceship"). And through this, to trace a secret thread, a subtle bond, a guiding and "psychological" path, penetrating into the heart of a sound definitively beyond itself.

At the start of "Flowers Made Of Flesh", a slightly distorted, grotesquely sinister voice suddenly emerges from the gothic tunnel built by strings and piano; in "Vivicide", the icy, desolate voice of a woman intones an a cappella chant, assailed by emptiness, abandoned to itself. It's a succession of structures built with the murderous grip of repetition, now frantic, now calculated. The piano lines that carve out "Your Life Is Over" like a music box in slow motion (and which then settle to the bottom, layer upon layer) and the heavier, more solemn ones that bring to life the melancholy panel of "Friend" weave the filigree of an ever more ambiguous sonic fabric, where desperation, resignation and despondency hide glimmers of revenge, murderous temptations concealed behind the veil of manipulation and displacement ("Miasma"). It's only natural, then, that if everything tends toward apotheosis, toward the definitive point of no return of Austin-ian art (see "Never Answer The Phone"), the path is marked by ever more pregnant, ever more tension-laden approximations. From the Crimson-esque (via Melvins) superhumanism of "Control The Media" to the psychotic romp of "Breadwinner", passing through the prog-cyber-death devastation of "Times Of Pain" (which boasts one of the most damn exhilarating openings of their career), it's all a mosaic of straight lines and digressions, of metallic shards juxtaposed as in some seditious machinery, hurtling toward delirium, toward the masterpiece within the masterpiece.

"Never Answer The Phone" is the story of a strange, frightening event that happened to us while recording the album. We genuinely believed a ghost was calling us. Or rather, that Steve's father's ghost was calling him. It all happened one night: we were working on some material when a message was left on the answering machine without the phone ever ringing. It's not very clear, but it seems to say: "Don't be afraid" and "In my Dodge", which is the make of the car in which Steve's father died in an accident. The recording serves as the backdrop to the track "Unhearthed". "Never Answer The Phone" was a genuine experiment, an experiment in "free movements of thought". We simply limited ourselves to playing, letting our subconscious slowly surface..."

(Marshall Kilpatric).

A mare magnum of torment, fear and exaltation, "Never Answer The Phone" is the summa, in twenty-three minutes, of a decade of experiments: a terminal black hole, automatic writing in the grip of ineffable spasms of terror, a drunken overtaking maneuver with the headlights off, amphetamine terror-noise-metal, a supremely pagan cleansing. It starts with a cavalcade of diseased spoken-word and catacomb feedback, with a vanishing point-chasm looming in the background. It's the drift of a nightmare, the dazed floating of a fixed idea, the evocation of the negative. Like a maniac savoring in advance the torment of his next victim in the half-light of his mind, at dusk. Then the break, the exhausting instrumental ascent, the panzer cadences, the convulsions repeated until they brush against a collapse that isn't there, that can't be there, because here what matters isn't resolution but rather the trip, the traversal of the span between two deathly extremes. And you can sense that behind the interplay lies the blinding glare of ecstasy, almost as if the trio were truly carrying out an exorcism, unleashing an insane energy, spitting out riffs and dissertations with epic disdain and annihilating rage. A rage that turns into sonic wreckage when disturbing frequencies, reversed tapes, delays fleeing into space, gestural slits and ever more submerged ambient-metropolitan shadow zones demote the trip to a black nightmare, inside an endless night: and a message, then (the bad news), is consumed through the cinematic medium ("Rosemary's Baby"?): "God is dead!". Everything else is a footnote. A foolish illusion. Bullshit to keep us hooked, because "Never Answer The Phone" is the journey to the end of the night: driving against traffic, eyes closed, waiting for the end...

In this climate of oppressive nihilism, it's now clear that hope is THE blasphemy, and the frenzied dance of witches in "I Live To See You Smile" confirms it absolutely. Despair has prevailed, as scripted. The title track's theme then returns to underline it, with a melancholy, anguished air. Even if, only beyond the hedge of silence, the voices, the noises, the creaks and the flutterings of a shared unconscious enact what is the true requiem of our time, secretly (but to what extent?) at the mercy of chaos. (2)

I've had enough of this shit!

Work on new material began immediately after the release of the live album Temple Of The Morning Star Live (2002). "Sadness had been our 'prog' record. Afterwards, I felt the need to reinvent myself, and so I tried to reinvigorate extreme metal, the kind, to be clear, that emerged in Earache's orbit between the late '80s and early '90s." Meanwhile, after a brief stint with John Gillis of Anal Cunt, Mike Rosswag (Circle Of The Dead Children) takes over behind the kit — a drummer with a fast, brutal touch, perfect to match the grind turn taken by Kiss The Pig (2004).

The title came to me one day while I was watching my son Hank play with his piggy bank. I thought to myself: 'Ironic! All of us, from the day we're born, do nothing but think about money, even though it's the ruin of mankind.' We'd kill for it. We fight wars for it. We screw people over for it. Money decides which movies and which music get to be heard. (...) Kiss The Pig is a violent indictment of what's happening right now in America. (...) I've had enough of this shit!

From the sound of the trigger that opens "Why They Hate Us", things are all too clear: this is the most overtly violent record of their career, even if, all things considered, it's also the least interesting one, lacking as it is that vitriolic schizophrenia that has always been the band's trademark. If the previous album had ventured down more abstract paths, Kiss The Pig returns to the raw nerve of vengeance, focusing almost exclusively on the genre's essentially pulverizing character, in the vein of forefathers Napalm Death and Carcass (the title track, "Outland", "Sympathy Junky", "Train Train", "Mother's Run"): double-kick at full throttle, deranged riffage, frantic blastbeats. The choice of a lo-fi production also contributes to the album's less-than-incisive impact — perhaps necessary to create a neurotic atmosphere, but ultimately superfluous given the already less-than-bracing character of the songs themselves. Against the barbaric gunfire, though, there's no shortage of more elaborate moments, where, even if only briefly, the music takes on more sophisticated contours. "This Machine Kills Fascists" is thus marked by more... er... human cadences and shifting dynamics; "Don't Thread On Hope" and "Platinum Pussy" bring back the malevolent echoes of the great predecessor, while "Bee's Wax And Star Wars" works through a more clearly progressive discourse. Still, it's only with "Birthright" that the band seems to come close to its past glories, with a long, disturbing parade of agony closed out by a delicate guitar arpeggio. Nothing so striking, however, as to keep us from pointing out that this record is the first and, to this day, only misstep in the Today Is The Day saga.

Two years pass and, almost for fun, Steve puts together the Taipan project (with Debari on bass and Patrick Kennedy of Ironboss on drums), under which name he releases 1002 – A Rock Odyssey, an uneven and genuinely lackluster work. Tracks like "Clairvoyant IX", "My Big Dick In Your Mouth", "Manzig", "Angel Dust", "Epiphany", "Baby Loves Daddy" present a sound light years away from the explosive power of Today Is The Day, in some cases even boldly mainstream. A genuine divertissement, in other words, as if our man had finally found the courage to set aside, if only for a while, his anxieties. (3)

If you want peace, prepare for war

After the release of Kiss The Pig, many believed Steve Austin had exhausted his supply of creative energy. Needless to say, though, three years later the "reverend" comes out with a work that once again boosts his creation's stock. Having enlisted Derek Roddy (former drummer of Nile, Hate Eternal and Malevolent Creation) after playing live with Jeff Lohrber, Graham LeDuc and keyboardist Aaron Kotilainen, the "new" Today Is The Day seem intent on retracing their steps, swimming back upstream with that avant-metal approach that has by now become their signature.

So, crossing Sadness… with In The Eyes Of God (and directly invoking Temple Of The Morning Star too in its more measured moments), Axis Of Eden (2007) points, with just the right dose of wisdom, toward a glorious past, frighteningly rich in great works. The formula is almost untouched, even if Roddy's drumming brings a none-too-shabby (brutal-)death metal punch to the table — something that might have raised a few "eyebrows" at first, but which gradually reveals itself as one of the key components in yet another recoding of a sound that simply refuses to settle for compromise. So while "I.E.D." would have cut quite a figure alongside gems like "Maggots And Riots" or "Myriad" (with its bone-crushing rhythm and an almost cyber alteration/radicalization of that already-extreme sound) and the desolate "Free At Last" renews a whole internal tradition of solemn, resigned descent into hell, a track like "Broken Promises And Dead Dreams" plays up this new perspective with a granite-hard, measured gait and a double-pedal pushed into overdrive.

But it's only with "If You Want Peace, Prepare For War" that the band truly comes to terms with the present, focusing on what might be its next steps. The real masterpiece of the record, and yet another peak in Steve's songbook, "If You Want Peace, Prepare For War" splits this mad urge to experiment, always and in every way, into two halves. Having first updated the ferocity of In The Eyes Of God to a post-Sadness… framework, suddenly, like a light dripping with hope, a rift of world-music opens up that — believe it or not! — conjures the Don Cherry of the "Relativity Suite"-"Orient"-"Blue Lake" triptych. Steve had hinted at this in some interviews. But, well, it's still quite something to hear him declaiming, almost hypnotized, amid the Eastern-tinged synth lines and Roddy's tribal colorings. Truly magical.

Then it's time again for repetition, for a minimalism loaded with hate and resentment ("No Lung Baby"), for vocal extremism, running accelerations, morbid and obsessive/obsessed martial structures ("Black Steyr Aug"). It's the epic of an everyday going-to-hell ("My Wish Is Your Command"), the march of the disinherited, annihilated but not struck dead ("My Wish Is Your Command"), the grandeur of a cruelty that dissolves into a background noise that's perhaps even more brutal, furrowed as it is by imperceptible tensions ("Total Resistance"). Crimson-esque complications and "Pinnacle" quotations fire up "The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Me"; a claustrophobic death-grind with a "robotic" aftertaste takes hold of the title track; a drum machine runs riot through the electro (!) of "Desolation". A game of variations and cross-references that keeps thrilling, shedding further light on one of the most exhilarating discographies of the last fifteen years.

In 2008, Derek Roddy leaves the band, apparently over a financial dispute with Austin. So, Mike Rosswog is once again recruited for the tour.

An epitaph for freedom…

With drummer Curran Reynolds and bassist Ryan Jones (both from Wetnurse), in 2011 Austin records Pain Is A Warning (9 tracks; 43:24), released by Black Market Activities (the label founded by The Red Chord vocalist Guy Kozowyk) and produced by his friend Kurt Ballou, guitarist of Converge.

"I've known Kurt since 1997. We've always been good friends. He asked me to produce "When Forever Comes Crashing" by Converge, and I obliged. So when I started thinking about the new album, with everything I had going on, I thought of him for the production…". Released in mid-August, the album is decent but certainly falls short of past peaks. Violence and rage are still very much present, but they're filtered through arrangements that by now feel tired and overly familiar, if not outright obliterated by a subdued, desolate mood, as in the case of the ballads (!) "Remember To Forget" and "This Is You" — the latter described by Steve as a cross between Nick Cave and Nirvana…

"On this record," Steve adds, "I gathered up the sufferings and triumphs of the last three years." And in this exposition — at times merciless, at times tinged with an unshakeable resignation — the album had opened with the geometric fury of "Expectations Exceed Reality", which does manage to stir something in the soul, thanks to its clear descent from Sadness Will Prevail. But it's an isolated case, because between spirals of hate and grind-noise lashes ("Death Curse"), a mid-tempo that slowly gains intensity (the title track, described as "an epitaph for freedom"), a "Wheelin'" that catches fire with punk ardor, the blistering and epic "Slave To Serenity" and a "The Devil's Blood" with a hard rock/sludge backdrop, the record (probably the least successful of a now two-decade-long career) slowly fades out without leaving much of a trace.

Backed by bassist Sean Conkling and drummer Jeff Lohrber, with Marc Ablasou adding just a touch of electronics on a couple of tracks, in 2014 Austin — who had by then reclaimed the control room for himself — released Animal Mother (15 tracks; 49:23). Compared to the previous record, the sound returns to being raw and violent, and the overall quality of the songs has markedly improved. Sure, it's not — as the band's own leader will claim a bit too enthusiastically — the best work his creature has ever produced, but it is at least a return to the fury and passion of its origins, somewhere between Temple Of The Morning Star and In The Eyes Of God (the title track, right from the start, makes that clear, with its sinister introspections mixed with bursts of noisecore/grind). An overall honest record, played with sincere passion, made up of pretty tough songs, but lacking any decisive blows. As mentioned, though, heaviness and violence are back in vogue — a violence, let's not forget, that's always controlled, "reasoned", never an end in itself. Across the album's fourteen chapters, these Today Is The Day lead us through upbeat progressions ("Sick Of Your Mouth"), heat up with the mathematical sludge of "Masada" and "Heathen" or the vigorous stoner of "Godcrutch", while Steve distorts his voice into a high pitch, assaulting us with blistering Black Sabbath-like phrasing, or else projects his grim visions toward spacey, psychedelic dimensions ("The Last Strand"). A fine listen, to be fair, especially when set against the Melvins' "Zodiac", whose cover closes out the vinyl version of the album. In this wild bunch, however, the acoustic ballads "Outlaw" (toward the end of the record, you also get its more brutal variant) and "Bloodwood" fit in about as well as a square peg in a round hole.

Epilogue

Never compromising, far removed from the music business, Today Is The Day have helped elevate heavy music to the status of "total" art form, influencing a host of bands (Converge, Knut, Mastodon, Cave In, Dillinger Escape Plan, Lamb Of God, etc.) who are often praised to the skies by fans without the proper recognition owed to their forefathers. Among the finest testaments to the expressive power of heavy sound, Steve Austin's band continues, undeterred, to dig without limits into the terror and frustration that stealthily strip the living flesh off the human soul.

(01/09/2007 – 25/11/2014)

The author wishes to dedicate this piece to Mario Subiaco and Stefano Villa: you'll recognize yourselves in it…

Notes:

1) The 2005 CD reissue adds the bonus track "Execution Style" (another complex mix of heart and brain), already released on Dope-Guns-'N-Fucking In The Streets: vol. 10 (1995), a split shared with Steel Pole Bath Tub, Chrome Cranks and Brainiac.

2) The Japanese edition features two bonus tracks: "You Gotta Give A Man A Mile" (a sort of traditional Japanese music, growing increasingly rhapsodic) and "The Good Life".

3) Other side-projects Steve has contributed to include KGB — with Rob Fusco on vocals, Chris Debari on bass and Jonah on drums — and Cyclops — with drummers Dave Witte and Brann Dailor and Aaron King on bass. Only unreleased material exists from both bands.

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