If hope is absent, there remains at least the desire for hope, and in that uneasy space Iron Lung and FRKSE offer an erstwhile companion as the trade winds of failing systems continue to buffet the human experiment.
A necessary reality check for those who claim to be politically averse
Seattle’s Iron Lung continue something uniquely their own with FRKSE‘s latest offering, Through The Slow Dusk. Here, samplers collide with traditional instrumentation and Crass-like vocal deliveries to bewail the dystopian realities of modern urban advancement through what I’d call an erudite pragmatism rather than the atonal pessimism one might first interpret experientially. Wiry tones meander over metallurgical beats, found-sound percussion and metal-bashing quotas evolve and dissolve, while the lyrical concerns encompass climate collapse, anachronistic anarchism’s potential and an almost Book of Revelation-like rapture.
Through The Slow Dusk is no pleasant waltz. It is a necessary reality check for those who claim to be politically averse. In this, it becomes a sour balm for anyone who decries politics altogether, or dares not comprehend that simply getting out of bed each morning—or refusing to—is itself a political statement. We either perform with the Machine, or attempt to work within it in ways that might still benefit those around us to form a collective consciousness for change whilst there’s short-time.
There is the possibility of hopelessness should we read the room if the album this way. As FRKSE states, “We’re cooked.” Yet this message arrives from the beautiful madness of the margins, clothed in the oldest Anarcho-punk ripped jeans. What becomes evident musically is the empirically expressed knowing of precisely what the artist seeks to communicate. There are no creative affectations here—only informed, frank, open-hearted and shoulder-shaking truths about the here and now, and its perhaps inevitable consequences. If hope is absent, there remains at least the desire for hope, and in that uneasy space Iron Lung and FRKSE offer an erstwhile companion as the trade winds of failing systems continue to buffet the human experiment.
Through The Slow Dusk is available on Iron Lung. [Bandcamp]
