July 02, 2011

Say Goodbye: A Social Grace.

a social grace cover

I've seen the sunshine
On the black side of the moon.

Introduction

‘Atmosphere’ is a term that one will hear very frequently in discussions of music, and in this post we shall attempt to investigate its meaning and significance as a musical phenomenon. Admittedly, its use is not always merited, and at times it can be reduced to a fairly meaningless phrase used to sell records; this can be especially pronounced in reviews. However, charades aside, I think that it does describe an important aspect of music in general, and as such it is worth at least exploring this side of things.

In doing this, there are not many records more appropriate to the subject than Psychotic Waltz’s ‘A Social Grace’. It in some ways exemplifies the ‘atmospheric’ side of heavy metal, insofar as it takes to extremes some of the aspects of heavy metal most responsible for its atmospheric elements, a trait which forms a large part of the unique nature of the record. What other records touch on and orbit around, Psychotic Waltz takes by the throat and, well, waltzes around psychotically with. Indeed, given the powerful atmosphere of this album, supplemented with its extraordinary songwriting, you should probably buy it.

The focus of this post will not be so much on what Psychotic Waltz try to convey as on how they do so, or rather what Psychotic Waltz try to convey shall be approached primarily via the investigation of how they try to convey it. In the process, we may also bring up comparisons with other bands in terms of the use of atmospheric elements, although the primary focus will be ‘A Social Grace’. If you wish to bring up other bands in the comments in relation to the themes explored here, feel free to do so.

I. Atmosphere.
Music does not appear to us as something directly tangible and external to us, at least not in the same way as a painting or film. Even in loud concerts, where it does take on a quite pronounced physical effect, it primarily appears as simply a motive force, rather than as something objectified  outside of us. Music may cause a glass to vibrate, but the music itself is not encapsulated by the vibrating glass. In a sense, then, music exists as something internal, directly rather than indirectly located within the mind. This impression is even stronger in private listening, where the music appears in isolation from any particular performers and the like, leaving us with only the music and ourselves; indeed, with headphones and such modes of listening, it does become quite literally (well, in a figurative sense) something in our heads.

Music, then, exists in the mind. However, the interaction of the two is not simply akin to that of water filling up a container, with music just pouring itself into the mind. Rather, it may make more sense to look at it as a presence of mutual conditioning, with music seeking to shape the mind to fit around it, while at the same time this shaping is an active mental process. Nonetheless, it may still make sense to refer to it as a sort of active filling of the listener’s internal space, or thought process, which gives it a particular shape and character when the listener focuses on it and allows their mind to follow it; not simply a passive surrender to the music, but an active concentration upon it. However, at the same time, the music conditions the manner in which the mind must act in focusing on it, so that  both the mind and the music are the active participants in the exchange. Atmosphere is not simply a gas, which takes on the shape of its container, but rather describes a wider interaction, and atmospheric elements of music designate those which contribute to and condition the active immersion of the listener in the music.

(However, in order to have the mind so operate actively, the music must first of all operate in such a way as to focus the mind upon it, and hence ‘fill up’ its concentration so as to allow it to move the mind as it likes. As such, the reference to ‘filling the mind’ may be worth using, in order to designate the process by which music is able to seize hold of the mind and have it direct its own movement in accordance with the music itself; that is, by which the music is able to condition the mind so as to shape its movements.)

There are various ways to do this, but here our focus shall be upon the use of various layers of sound within the music itself. (The use of silence itself as a layer won’t be treated of in this post, although it may be later on.) The subject of musical layering is itself quite wide, and could encompass subjects like counterpoint, the use of additional instruments, differences between the right- and left-ear channels, and so on. All in all, however, it focuses upon music’s textural qualities, the interaction of various layers and instruments to create a coherent whole, with the mind itself having to establish and create this unity in the listening process.

Psychotic Waltz give these textural aspects a prominent part in their music. Their music is ultimately not written primarily to get across nice-sounding riffs or impressive vocal lines, but rather in a manner directed towards textural aspects of the music, created by the interaction of multiple semi-autonomous layers. Two main means of doing this are on the one hand the addition of additional tracks, that is, the overlaying of additional layers of music and instruments over the band’s core instruments, and on the other hand the general interaction between the various instruments themselves, as well as the vocals.

A notable example of the first of these is the song ‘Successor’. During the verses, a strange track sounding almost like a mechanised chanting plays in the background, paralleling the vocals. Despite its subtlety, it significantly increases the effectiveness of the track. In many tracks its addition would serve to distract from the instruments themselves, but here it contributes to the overall texture of the piece, through playing simultaneously with it and hence adding additional layers to the sound. It effectively creates another auditory stimulus which must be integrated into the whole, hence forcing the listener to focus their mind upon hearing all parts at once and putting them together, which allows the music itself to almost ‘wrap around’ them; this is enhanced by its being focused in one ear, meaning that one has different parts of the music in different ‘places’ of the mind, so to speak, and must weave them together. The result of this is that the music actively becomes a part of the listener’s own thought process, not simply in the sense that they focus upon it, but now in the sense that their thoughts now consist of the attempt to fit everything together. It’s no longer something external and focused upon, but rather internal. A similar effect is created by the sound effects used at the beginning of the song, which make it atmospheric in an almost literal sense, as if something suffusing the surrounding air.

The fact that the background noises parallel the vocals also means that one focuses on the vocals themselves in a different way, almost in relation to the background, making them more effective in the context of the impending danger that the song represents. Both of these aspects, the fact that one listens to one part of the music in relation to another, and its ability to surround and suffuse the mind, enter into the greater aim which this accomplishes, namely that of inducting the listener into the paradigm, so to speak, of the song, within which it can do as it likes; enveloping the listener in the song. Kevin Moore, in Chroma Key albums like ‘You Go Now’, doesn’t need to make the lyrics tell a complete story, or indeed much more than some phrases, precisely because of how effectively the music creates its own paradigm, using different channels, recurring melodies, and so on; he doesn’t need much more than words, and he doesn’t need a backstory, because the listeners are within the paradigm of the songs and are effectively experiencing the songs as their own thoughts, or indeed their own product (and here the artist-audience hierarchy breaks down), so that they really don’t need to be told about what is now their own past, or have their life narrated to them.

Of course, the difference between Chroma Key and ‘Successor’ is that Chroma Key is almost always first-person music, in the sense that the listener puts themselves into the shoes of the song’s ‘narrator’,  as it were, even when the song itself is addressed to a second person, or ‘you’ (who is not the listener, but rather is also a ‘you’ for the listener; another notable album which does this is ‘A Pleasant Shade of Grey’), while ‘Successor’ is legitimately second-person, in that the listener does not relate primarily to the computer narrator, but rather in fact takes the place of the ‘you’ referred to by them. This is emphasized by how the music mainly takes on a threatening aura, reflecting the threat of the narrator to the ‘you’, rather than reflecting the narrator’s thoughts; it relates to an external threat, albeit with an externality produced by the creator themselves.

Of course, the corollary of the mind being filled and occupied is that all else drops out of it, at least to some extent. It is hence emptied, in a sense. You probably recognize the feeling of having listened to a great album, and then its ending and leaving one suddenly in silence, in a way which almost emphasizes the power of the album. ‘Hey, you’re back to real life, but not as you knew it!’ Ordinarily, when listening to nothing, one’s mind may be wandering all over the place; here, coming off its singular focus on the music, the silence is different to an ordinary silence.

Of course, this form of ‘emptying’ is by not exclusive to music as such; for example, it forms an important part of what is known as ‘catharsis’ in tragic theatre, and may even have an equivalent in static visual art, although I wouldn’t know about that. Of course, as in drama, it’s mainly a feeling that one has after a more ‘weighty’ album, one heavy in terms of subject matter, and after an ending which does not simply do away with the previous troubles in glorious light, but rather incorporates them into either a dark ending or one which, though positive, does not simply forget earlier issues but rather incorporates them into it to create a feeling of not simply happiness, but also overcoming.

(This sort of emptying also forms a justification for the outro, as a winding down of the album which returns one to silence rather than ending on melodrama; if ‘Hamlet’ does it, why not ‘A Social Grace’?)

Psychotic Waltz do not simply fill the mind, but like to contort it in various directions. Of course, they can only do this because they have a hold of it and have filled it in the first place, but nonetheless after that filling it’s a bit of a rollercoaster ride. The music is highly active, with riffs which, if not techno-thrash riffs, are still close cousins, and hence drags the mind around whithersoever it goes. It’s not simply a matter of creating strange riffs flying everywhere and hoping that this will be effective, but rather Psychotic Waltz do the basics right, immersing the listener, and this allows their riffs to have the power which they do; indeed, they hardly seem overly keen to play complex riffs, and often don’t when their music doesn’t demand it. That they do this is not simply connected to personal idiosyncrasies, the desire to create atmosphere as such simply because it’s aesthetically good to do so, or a penchant for showing off, but is rather connected with the kind of atmosphere that is being conveyed, and the underlying conception and message of the album. This is akin in a way to what Kitto referred to as the ‘tragic conceptions’ of the Greek dramatists, in his attempt at explaining the individual styles of various artists not simply from personal idiosyncrasies, but rather from the vision and idea animating their plays.

In order to begin our investigation of this underlying conception, let us return to ‘Successor’. The effect of the background layer of sound is ultimately to create an ominous, almost sinister feeling, and this is effected in large part through its relation to the rest of the music. Through its position in the background of the music, lurking beneath the surface, it, of course, fits with the general theme of the music. However, in its role of creating atmosphere, and forcing the listener’s mind into a state of high activity, it gives the music an almost suffocating feeling, making it feel almost like an alien, dominating power. The song’s narrator isn’t attempting to take power because the inventor is a bad person as such, but rather there’s a sense of underlying inevitability; the computer does it because that’s what it does, and the person responsible doesn’t know what they have created. It is in that sense not simply karma, or the soul’s own suffering from sin, but rather an alien power. The listener creates it by listening to it; Psychotic Waltz aren’t a ‘fun’ band to listen to as such, but they are a powerful one. You’re listening to this, and there’s nothing you can do about it. (Well, you can turn it off, but that’s not an option ‘IC’, in roleplaying-speak. In any case, why would you turn off a Psychotic Waltz record, heretic?)

This ‘smothering’ is a result of a sense of ‘overstimulation’, where the mind is forced to fill itself with many elements of music at once, and the parallel between the vocals and background elements means that the two are brought into a single force and hence the vocals seem to almost echo, creating a sense of omnipresence and a resonance which is in no way sympathetic. The ‘emptying out’ of the mind is here the seizing of it, where its emptiness means simply that there is no escape; while Chroma Key and recent Fates Warning invite you to place yourself within them, Psychotic Waltz swarms around you and grabs you by the throat, and if Chroma Key have an ‘open’ sound, Psychotic Waltz have one which surrounds and assaults. As such, their music is also generally more ‘active’ and heavy, with its riffs running about and a sense of oversaturation in contrast to the aforementioned bands’ carefully constructed minimalism. It is perhaps worth noting that Fates Warning do dabble on both sides to a notable extent, and indeed this forms a major part of the power of ‘A Pleasant Shade of Grey’, but nonetheless when it comes to spaciousness there’s not much better; Psychotic Waltz, too, would move towards the other side more often in their later albums, and were by no means one-sided in this one, but nonetheless it does form their prevailing sound. You could also compare King Crimson’s ‘Red’ with ‘A Scarcity of Miracles’ in this connection.

This could also explain the ‘second-person’ feeling that the album has to a large extent, as if a communication with the listener, rather than the highly first-person and introverted feeling of albums like APSoG, where the listener places themselves in the shoes of the subject of the song, or the feeling of being practically an emanation from one’s own soul, as in bands like Echo Us, and occasionally Holocaust (most notably in songs like ‘Home from Home’, which I like to call their ‘prayer songs’. Holocaust are interesting in that they prominently use not only the singular first-person and second-person views, but also often include music based around the ‘we’). If a sort of alienated force is to be conveyed, the second-person perspective is appropriate, as it allows the music to constitute itself as something external and oppressive in relation to the listener; hence, while APSoG is highly personal in scale, bands like Watchtower and Psychotic Waltz are less so, the former often social, the latter cosmic. John Arch’s use of fantastic settings, and, for example, the representation of the internal journey of ‘The Apparition’ as an external journey in a foreign world (as opposed to APSoG’s internal journey, which is conveyed through, well, just that), gives the music a feeling of externality as well, which, especially in ‘The Spectre Within’, may reflect the thematic similarities with Psychotic Waltz.

In saying this, we may also comment on another important factor in Psychotic Waltz’s music. On the one hand, unlike, say, APSoG, it doesn’t have any direct continuity as such, and is hardly a concept album; nonetheless, it is still united by its  underlying conception, giving it thematic consistency if not narrative consistency. This may be compared, in a way, to Kitto’s view of the relationship between Euripides’ and Sophocles’ methods of writing tragedy. Sophocles, famously enough, was practically the embodiment of Aristotle’s views on tragedy, and his tragedy was mainly focused on characters and their tragic flaws, so that he required both a strict consistency of character, and that events followed each other with, as Aristotle put it, the force of necessity, rather than simply being various episodes. Here, the universality of the play consists of the viewer’s ability to relate to the character and almost become them for the duration of the play, in the characters embodying things universal to humanity. This reaches its more modern peak in ‘Hamlet’, with its highly distinctive main character that we almost know by the time the play is over; or, at least, we may know him, although god knows the literary critics don’t. It also requires a protagonist who is not simply presented as ‘pathetic’, as suffering or oppressed, but rather has an inner strength of resistance, as it were a sense of resistant humanity, which characters like Hamlet certainly have, if not when acted out by Lawrence Olivier (for reference, I generally agree with Bernard Grebanier as regards Hamlet’s tragic flaw), and which is also shared by the narrators of APSoG and Sider’s ‘Labyrinth’.

Euripides, by contrast, used his characters simply as illustrations of a deeper, underlying theme, as one would use a leaf to teach a child what ‘green’ means. Of course, Sophocles didn’t simply develop characters for their own sake, at least not mostly, but nonetheless in him the theme was essentially immanent in and inseparable from the character and our relating to them, while in Euripides it is based upon almost an alienation effect, where we can stand somewhat separate from the characters themselves and view them as types of a greater whole rather than as themselves a totality. As such, his plays could take on a non-Aristotelian, episodic form, with a succession of events with no logical relation to each other, at least in the Aristotelian sense of necessary connection, but only a thematic unity. Hence, one could have some characters entering and exiting, or a new plotline arising later in the play, while in the meantime the chorus sang about the suffering caused by the Trojan War. The characters need not be as fleshed out as those of Sophocles, but can rather be types, illustrations, embodiments of certain unchecked emotions, and so on. The tragedy was not simply the tragedy of the individual, but of society or humanity in a collective sense (a tragedy of humanity for Sophocles meant one of the human individual).

We may place Psychotic Waltz on the Euripidean side of things, at least in this sense. APSoG-era Fates would probably fit closer to the first bracket. Psychotic Waltz’s songs are indeed more or less episodic, rather than forming a complete, singular narrative, but are not thereby patchwork. The inventor whom we are to take the place of in ‘Successor’ is not a fleshed out character, but rather is essentially pathetic in stature, the inevitable victim without a voice. The computer narrator does in fact have multiple dimensions (‘Give me a name’), as does the devil of ‘…And The Devil Cried’, but this is only, as we shall later discuss, so as to emphasize that ultimately the real ‘villain’ of this record is not someone or something malicious or evil, but rather simply an alien force of necessity, which operates regardless of sentiment, whether of human or devil. It’s not that bad things happen because the devil commands it, but rather the devil himself has no choice in the matter; that’s how things happen, deal with it. Likewise, Euripides’ Greeks are not irredeemably evil, even when the play circles around the suffering which they cause; while their victims are primarily pathetic, the play itself must give the Greeks multiple dimensions, so as to create a message transcending simply, “Greeks are bad,” which may be appropriate for propaganda but not for art.

In addition, this style is not only complemented by the second-person point of view, but also complements it. As most writers will know, one of the greatest problems with second-person stories is precisely that the reader is not actually the person written about; the ‘No, I didn’t go to that party and have sex with twenty guys’ syndrome. However, Psychotic Waltz, because they need not flesh out their characters, may also provide the listener with simply a generic role to fill, so that the focus is not upon their individual personality but upon the forces outside of them; the inventor does embody a type of human, but is given not that many more dimensions than as such a symbol. The music doesn’t ask you to be something that you’re not, but rather represents external forces that one can now feel in the music itself, and insofar as the role of the inventor is defined precisely by his position within these forces, one can enter into the role simply by listening to the music. You’re not an inventor? Well, you are now, deal with it.

This established, then, we must still establish the purpose of Psychotic Waltz’s alien powers and forces; not simply that alien powers may sound pleasant to listen to songs about, or make one appear aesthetically impressive, but rather what exactly they’re supposed to represent, and what this reveals about the underlying conception of this album. For this, we may turn to a more detailed examination of the songs themselves, as well as of their lyrical themes.

II. These devils that we accept as reality.

Interviewer: "Nothing" has a definite spiritual message in it...
     Brian: "It's like a lot of people aren't concerned with their spirit, just their body. We're trying to get people to see the difference there.  We're not preachers or anything though."
Dan: "It's like the bumper sticker that says, 'He who dies with the most toys wins'.  It's a pretty basic & stupid attitude to have in life."
   Norm: " 'You have to give back everything you borrowed in this lifetime', is one of the lyrics in the song.
Brian: "It's like, when you die, you wanna leave something behind for people to remember . You don't want them to remember you for being materialistic, or something people will look down on. You want to leave a positive message with people so they can remember you for that."

Psychotic Waltz’s music often features a feeling of hostility or oppression, but not one of maliciousness or evil as such. If there are external, alien forces, they are not simply cackling super-villains writ large, even when they are sinister; the point is not one of victimization by evil, overpowering forces, which may make for nice pathos but wouldn’t really convey much, but rather of powers which are neither malicious, at least not as a focal point of their character, nor autonomous. In a way, and this is something that we will elaborate upon through the investigation, they are quite similar to the spectres of early Fates Warning, both in their ultimate lack of maliciousness and their status as a human product. We have already discussed, for example, how the characterization in ‘Successor’ and ‘…And the Devil Cried’ serves to make sure that the focus is not simply on how evil the antagonist is, in the same way that Mary Shelley’s focus on the innocence and virtues of the monster meant a story almost completely different in significance to movies which removed these elements for the sake of horror.

Though the album is dark, its antagonists are not bad people, but rather, as said, alien forces. However, these forces are themselves portrayed as human constructs. The two most blatant examples of this are ‘Spiral Tower’ and ‘Successor’, which refer quite explicitly to human creation. The two can in some sense be grouped together, at least thematically, so let us look at some common features. In the first place, the characterization of the humans involved in the story is in one that of an inventor, in another that of the ‘architects’; hence, the focus is upon their existence as beings who create, and they are explicitly taken insofar as they are productive and active beings rather than simply passive receptacles. This does not, mind, make them tragic individuals in a Sophoclean sense, and indeed their characterization does not go much further than this of being architects or inventors; the focus of the song is not upon them qua characters, but rather upon their actions and their product itself, both times their creations rather than themselves finding a place in the title. Furthermore, both have a collective, rather than an individual, significance; the architects more directly, the inventor being referred to simply as ‘son of creation’, hence implying that the song is addressed ultimately to humanity as a whole.

Another common feature of the songs is the idea that neither ultimately knows what they are building, which strengthens the sense of the creations as alienated and autonomous forces despite their being created; that is, the people, through their action, produce something alien and unknown to them. The architects of ‘Spiral Tower’ are “still none the wise of what they’ve really done,” while the inventor’s lack of knowledge of the consequences of their actions in ‘Successor’ is a prominent theme throughout the song. Likewise, in both cases the punishment of the creators is not presented positively. In ‘Successor’, apart from the song’s dark atmosphere clearly placing the audience in the viewpoint of the inventor, humanity, rather than the scheming creation, the computer’s victory is not presented in a positive or triumphant tone, but rather in sinister terms of slavery, bowing at ‘microchip altars’, and so on. The inventor is no ‘evil genius’, but rather is simply presented as helping the computer to grow and so on, in other words as earnestly paving the road to hell. The ending is not to be exalted, but rather it is a human tragedy; the computer is ultimately given no motives, nor painted as particularly evil (sinister yes, evil no), but simply as powerful, so that ultimately their conquest is not a result of any of their character flaws, but rather the inevitable consequence of humanity creating and becoming dependent upon a power greater than and alien from themselves.

While ‘Successor’ certainly has echoes of Frankenstein, with the inventor ‘creating a brain’ and so on, this doesn’t mean that the creature created is akin to Frankenstein’s humanoid monster, assembled from human body parts. The stress is rather on the creation’s mechanistic nature, with the references to their ‘microchip altar’, and to their being a ‘thoughtless machine’ in which one inputs ‘data’. They are, rather, robotic or computeristic, with the idea of inputting data into them and their having microchips giving them definite parallels with modern technology. As such, we may place the robot as essentially a symbol of our technological and material creations which eventually leave our control and start to operate of themselves. Humans have, “allowed the very products of their hands to turn against them and be transformed into as many instruments of their own subjugation.”

Likewise, in ‘Spiral Tower’, the aforementioned tower is identified with “iron bars and bricks of stone,” with humanity’s material creations, their ‘temples of material things’, as ‘Spiral Tower’ puts it. In addition, it is also identified with money and greed, which hence enlarges the focus from simply products to the general focus upon the material, upon the appetites, in a manner paralleling the focus of early Fates Warning; indeed, ‘Spiral Tower’ is in some ways similar to ‘Damnation’.

Underlying all of this is the irony that human creations eventually turn into ends in themselves, standing over and above humanity; the architects ultimately simply produce for the sake of production, not ultimately building themselves up but only the tower without them. They produce for money, and hence money, this material thing, becomes an end which is itself embodied in the tower; they gain money for the sake of seeking more money, and ultimately their aim is not themselves, but rather simply to continually build up the tower, each time acting for money, which does not therefore serve them so much as they serve it in continually acting towards its demands. Money here is presumably used to represent material greed in its most generalized and condensed form; not any particular material, but the world of material things in general; the purpose is not any specific form of satisfaction, and hence nor is the target of the song simply a specific form of material gratification (as it would be if, for example, they acted for the sake of alcohol), but simply the material in the abstract.

The aforementioned irony is represented even more explicitly in ‘Successor’, where the titular character comments that they will ‘add to your strength’ and ‘quicken your speed’. A similar irony is expressed in Fates Warning’s ‘The Spectre Within’, with the man who, seemingly paradoxically, sacrifices ‘life for living’; the material was supposed to satisfy him eand work towards his ends, but now he must satisfy it and work towards its ends. Each satisfaction is temporary, and hence he must continually return whence he came, becoming hence dependent upon these forces, which thereby become a power over him. In this sense, ‘Successor’ could be seen as representing far more than simply a warning about how AI could be dangerous, and having instead a more universal message. A similar thing, the products of man’s hands growing into autonomous powers out of his control, could be what is expressed by the description of the destruction wrought by the spiral tower, and its eventual fall being a ‘surprise’. The ending, which states that the spiral tower falls to be ‘born again’, essentially treats the spiral tower as a subject, hence implying that the human beings themselves simply exist as servants of it; it is this sort of subjectivity, rather than the literal subjectivity of AI as such, that is probably the ultimate point of ‘Successor’.

Hence, then, these overpowering forces are the products of man himself. They, are, therefore, not immutable; to the contrary:

These devils that we accept as reality
Did not exist here before,
Nor do I think they were meant to be.

They are not sinister, cosmic forces which have existed immortally and torment man from without, they are rather his own products. When man was a ‘wiser thing’, they had no existence; now, however, they are so ubiquitous as to be ‘accepted as reality’. This latter is, incidentally, a rather interesting phrase;  perhaps it implies that humanity under the grip of the material sees these devils as inherent to human life, transhistorical, and as also representing their true self-interests, while in actual fact they are not real beings of themselves, but rather our own projections.  The illusions are immanent to our state of being, and the devils are only Brocken devils.

II.I. The songs.
II. I.I. …And The Devil Cried.

Well could you pay the price ,
If we rolled off the dice,
Just a piece of your soul down again;
The rules are simple as they seem,
Just roll a one or roll thirteen,
And all is back now, free and clear now.

In ‘…And the Devil Cried’, a life based around material things is compared to gambling with the devil, and when your life is like a modern Helloween album you know that you must be doing something wrong. However, let’s look at the intricacies of the game. In the first place, we gamble by laying down our soul; this reflects the sacrifice of soul to body already indicated in our prior comments and the quote on ‘Nothing’. However, this game is ultimately unwinnable; given that one can assume that it’s played with two dice, it would be impossible to roll either one or thirteen; thirteen, of course, is a number with another significance in this context as well, although the fundamental point seems to be that it is out of range of the dice. As the lyrics say, “You cannot win now; play again, now.” We keep on going, but victory is not a part of the game; each day we give up pieces of our soul, but we don’t win and have to play over and over again, the cycle already identified in the Fates Warning entry; the targets, 1 and 13, appearing always within our sight, yet still beyond the boundaries. The connection of the game to the search for material things is brought out even more explicitly in the following:

Taste of earthly pleasures,
See the harlots smiling,
Feel the evil passion,
Clawing, crying, crying on.

However, the song itself makes sure to focus upon our own self-created suffering, rather than on how evil the devil is. This culminates in the devil, seemingly the narrator of the song, himself crying. There is no external manipulator that we can blame, no Satanic embodiment of evil to pin everything on, there is rather our own desires and passions. As such, it is not a simple matter of exorcising some demons to make everything alright, nor can it be excused by simply appealing to the overwhelming force of evil, but rather it’s a fight against the devil within, so to speak. As if to ram home the point that the song designates the sacrifice of soul to body, the song ends with a reference to the lost fortune as ‘your soul and your mind.’

A similar point about the transitory nature of material ‘victory’ is expressed in ‘I of the Storm’:

I've seen the towers
Lying crumbled at my feet,
And I've seen the cities,
And the wastelands that remain,
And I've seen the victory
And the prize that none shall keep,
And the short time
That the glory hides the pain.

The transitory nature of the material, of course, gains its most direct existence in death:

Soon you'll have to give back
Everything you've borrowed for this lifetime
Only then you'll find
You have spent all this time
Struggling for the wrong things
And all of your works here have been nothing.

II.I.II. The softer songs: Halo of Thorns and I Remember.

However, it is hardly enough to simply portray antagonistic forces if a message is to be gotten across, rather than simple intimidation. As such, the songs ‘Halo of Thorns’ and ‘I Remember’ take up the perspective of suffering humanity, a human perspective, and because of this the churning riffs must be silenced, at least to a larger extent; from a purely musical point of view, this allows the listener to recover, while from the point of view of the album’s purpose it serves to introduce a human viewpoint into the procedure, so that we don’t simply look upon the music as something ultimately outside of us, as an external proclamation of our evils or a warning, but are able to latch onto an aspect of it and appreciate that the powers elsewhere mentioned do in fact have a concrete effect upon real humans.

‘I Remember’ ends with the powerful verse:

Let's take a look now what we've changed,
After all we're still so much the same;
After all this time,
Can't we make up our minds,
Must we all play the losing game?

(It changes to ‘guess we’ll all play the losing game’ for the final iteration.)

Again, we have humanity simply continuing to build onwards, regardless of human interests; we play a game that we must lose, but we simply go on playing it. That is the essential tragedy expressed by this album.

II.I.III. The world as illusion: ‘In This Place’ and ‘Nothing’.

‘Nothing’ initially seems to be an idealist treatise, but as the description of it in the interview above makes clear, it is not so much a treatise on metaphysics as on the fixation with the material. In counter to this, Cartesian and idealist imagery of the world being an illusion is used; not, then, in order to make a philosophical polemic, but rather as a way of showing rather than telling. The finite is nothing, and the mind is all that has true existence. The body is just a tool of the mind. Everything is nothing.

This conception is reflected in ‘In This Place’. Now, perhaps the most initially illuminating lines about the meaning of this song are the following:

Racer of the chase for pleasure,
Actor of the child at play
Lay down, it's time for nappie, baby,
Taking all your toys away.

This serves to illuminate the meaning of the rest of the song, the references to ‘the lies that you hear with your eyes’, the comment on how ‘I don’t mean to imply that you’d utterly lie’, and that ‘I can’t stand to face what I fear is real.’ Here exists the connection with ‘Nothing’, and just as much with ‘The Apparition’: the realization that the finite is nothing, that our ‘toys’ are necessarily taken away and all that we do rendered meaningless. The song, then, seems like it in all likelihood involves the narrator’s death, at least in some sense, which would seem to be implied by ‘Kiss me goodnight’; likewise, the person addressed seems to be assuring them, essentially, of the existence of the world and of what is apparent, as opposed to the realization that it is illusion. These illusions are the lies seen by their eyes. Likewise, the lines:

Take a look at yourself, take a look at me,
I believe you miss all there is to see.

Would seem to be a reference to the body/soul dichotomy, with the other person seeing them as a body rather than a soul. The narrator realizes the meaninglessness of their life, and that their life is now nothing; their interlocutor tries to assure them that material things are the primary reality and that they are alive. They have sold off their souls, but the other person can’t see that. Whether it is a description of physical or spiritual death, in either case it would seem to get something similar across.

III. Atmosphere: Layers.

Having looked in more detail at the conceptions underlying the album, as well as looking at some of its songs in summarized form, let us now look into some more specific examples of atmosphere, primarily those involving the interaction between the ‘core instruments’ of the band rather than additional sound effects.

To begin with, let us look at the interaction between the vocals and guitars in the verses of ‘In This Place’. The most immediately striking thing about these is how the vocals and guitars seem to be on almost different planes, with the vocals following their own path and taking their time while the guitars twist around beneath them. ‘I cannot stand to see what I see…’; meanwhile the guitars have been all over the place, seemingly out of sync with the vocals. However, nonetheless, the effect of this incongruence is not to make the music seem incoherent, but rather to lend it power; the ‘jerky’ feel of the riffs is made into a powerful force by our minds at the same time trying to follow the more straightforward line of the vocals, so that each twist in the riffs becomes a twist or jerk in the mind, which tries to keep its course and hence is made contact with. Simply having technical riffs does not guarantee such a conflict; rather, what is important is that they be irregular relative to the rest of the music, within the paradigm of the music, rather than simply irregular as such. The vocals, though not regular between lines, is continuous enough within lines to interact well with the music here. The listener experiences the strain of putting everything together.

Likewise, the drumming often incorporates sudden pauses and rests to complement the riffs; these kinds of missed beats tend to cause motion in the human body, and in Psychotic Waltz this motion is almost enforced, as well as irregular, closer to being thrown around, or to the throes of one enchained than to conventional headbanging. Sometimes, the drums are brought into the foreground, as for example between the first and second verses of ‘Spiral Tower’. There, the riffs follow a slower, repeated pattern, while the drums become the source of the music’s dynamism; this is used to convey a sense of emptiness, or degradation and decadence, which can be achieved precisely due to the guitars’ relative retreat into the background. While in combination with the riffs, the drums tend to complement their twisting effect, here they serve to provide a sort of break in the music, sounding almost lonely in their beats. The shifts of prominence of the various instruments can be subtle, but are still powerful; for example, in the chorus of ‘I of the Storm’, where the drums come out of their seeming obscurity, which assisted Lackey’s vocals in being the focal point, to the foreground; in that song, they vary noticeably from a more relatively laid-back approach during the verses to spurts of activity outside of them, while they do almost the opposite in ‘Strange’.

The effect of this kind of contrast is on the one hand to use all of the elements which Psychotic Waltz possesses, hence creating variety, but also to establish multiple layers which move backwards and forwards in the listener’s mind, hence creating an even stronger sense of dynamism. The momentary spurt of activity of the drums in 'A Psychotic Waltz’ ('in circles, in circles they spin…’) is all the more effective due to their discipline during the rest of the verse, jumping out of the background to force the listener’s mind to move along with it; likewise, when the guitar falls quieter just before the last few verses, this is stronger due to its prior riffing. The effect of this is a sense of constant motion and flux, which does not allow the listener to rest, but rather drags them onwards on the psychotic waltz. It is not here necessary to add extra layers, but rather a similar effect is obtained simply by shifting the distribution of the layers, keeping the listener’s mind filled through sheer dynamism.

IV. Escape?

I’ll cease to find the point in living
Only if I cease to dream.

However, is there any escape from this labyrinth in which we are trapped? Well, Psychotic Waltz offer no easy answers, but, like ‘The Spectre Within’, only struggle. The self-titled track attacks those who live in self-assurance, dismissing the problems of existence with established dogmas. The content of ‘A Psychotic Waltz’ is not one of simply criticism of religion, or an assured ridicule of it, but rather expresses the ridiculous nature it appears to have for one who has faced the problems of existence:

Looking at lost life and darkness,
My eyes shall not see;
Makes me laugh when he calls it all sin.

‘My eyes shall not see’; this is hardly a comfortable act of criticism. Indeed, a large part of the song focuses not on religion, but upon the struggles of the individual, on the psychotic waltz:

As the days pass by,
I watch as the net closes in,
As they circle around in my head;
Turning and winding,
In circles, in circles they spin,
Never ending, beginning the end.

Indeed, a song merely critical of religion would be out-of-place on an album with a general conception behind it like this, in the same way that ‘Valley of the Dolls’ would be out-of-place and detrimental on ‘The Spectre Within’. The focus is still upon the struggle. The criticism, then, is precisely that, ‘The priest shields his face from the wind’, that religion here is essentially simply a mode of evasion of the real problems of existence, which hence means that the means by which it must be criticized are precisely to display these problems, the ephemeral nature of being (‘lost life and darkness’ seems a bit similar to songs like ‘The Apparition’), which is in harmony with Psychotic Waltz’s general modus operandi.

In a sense, the attack on various ways to escape the problems of existence and finitude forms the major content of Psychotic Waltz’s work, the attempts to escape it both in material pleasures and in religious spiritualism. ‘Halo of Thorns’, on the other hand, from its human perspective allows a summary of the human condition, an illustration of these problems of existence; the sense of being small in time and space, the sense that the world is out of our control, and we are dominated by the immensity of the universe, like play-actors. This is also dealt with in ‘Another Prophet Song’, a song which essentially synthesizes all of the various elements of Psychotic Waltz’s album, hence being one of the most varied songs and likewise the song most capable of standing alone, tied together with probably the most powerful vocal performance on the album; due to this nature, it could well be more appropriate to treat it in a later post by itself, rather than here.

In that case, then, the reference to Socrates’ dictum that the wisest is he who realizes that he knows nothing is very much appropriate to the album’s content, and forms a very appropriate way of ending the album. Psychotic Waltz are not here to guide you, but to undermine your sense of security, and shake you out of your comfort zone; there is no easy route to life, and the problem must be faced and dissolved. Like Socrates, they do not pretend to know; however, they know of their own lack of knowledge, and this is a wisdom greater than all dogmas. The finitude of the individual, and of mankind as a whole (reflected in the occasional use of apocalyptic imagery), are things which must be faced; as Paul Tillich would comment, any true self-affirmation must incorporate despair and negation into itself.

However, Psychotic Waltz will not leave us with no hope whatsoever; Fates Warning, in the similarly-themed ‘The Spectre Within’, gave us ‘Pirates of the Underground’ to suggest the possibility of some sort of escape, while Psychotic Waltz provide us with the bonus track ‘Only in a Dream’. Here, the sparrow illustrates the restricted nature of the physical, is separated from the world and cannot see what is real. However, for all that, it can dream. Again, we have the dichotomy of mind and body; while Descartes may have been a bit apprehensive about the idea that a sparrow has a soul, nonetheless we can at least accept it as an allegorical soul. Here, it becomes clear that the mind, not the body, forges the way to escape from our despair; the ability to dream, to hence transcend the physical, points the way forward and indicates that our lives have purpose, even if it is not itself this purpose. Even if dreaming is not the answer to the question, and indeed does not escape from it, nonetheless it indicates that despite our finitude in space and time, there is something more; this, then, is why life’s worth its living at all.

Fates Warning are often noted for their use of ‘fantastic’ themes in their lyrics, to the point of, in ‘Guardian’, referring to ‘an endless dream’, a dream made reality and reality filled with the spiritual (not, therefore, merely a dream as a form of escapism, although even this form of escapism, if not a genuine escape, does point the way forward, although it must be brought into reality). Here, however, dreaming, fantasy, is identified as the basis of our hope of escape, of the autonomy of the mind in such a way that it, not being reducible to the bodily, may transcend the problems of finitude. However, such a realization is not enough, but rather must be translated into concrete, physical life, which hence must itself be transformed for us, or take on a transformed significance, compared to our previous view of it when lost in illusions. We must not only change our minds, but also our lives, as it were.

And how? Well, Psychotic Waltz don’t know. Sometimes seeing the problem clearly is itself the road to the solution; we must not seek to conquer our fear through various conjurations and dogmas, but rather we must put up with its constant existence along our journey. Arcana is only a step away, and a step is a long way to walk.

V. Conclusion.

Psychotic Waltz’s music has many layers, not only on the scale of a song and the instruments used in it, but also in terms of the album itself. It has various songs, each one having on the one hand a surface of notes, lyrics, melodies and so on, and on the other hand an undercurrent of atmosphere built up by this, the victory of the machine on the surface and the defeat of humanity the hidden undercurrent; below all of these atmospheres lies a more or less single, uniting conception which realizes itself through these various atmospheres like a Hegelian spirit. The shape of the album is such as to ensure a movement between different styles in close proximity, the softer songs interspersed with heavier ones; ‘…And the Devil Cried’ followed by ‘Halo of Thorns’, ‘In This Place’ followed by ‘I Remember’, the hard-hitting ‘I of the Storm’ by the complex ‘A Psychotic Waltz’, and later also ‘Only in a Dream’, before finally going out with a bang on ‘Strange’ and ‘Nothing’, and later ‘Spiral Tower’ as well. Different types of music build upon and enhance each other, themselves as layers; the arrangement of the songs itself seems to be aimed primarily after musical effect rather than direct thematic resemblance. In a sense, then, Psychotic Waltz’s album is based to a large extent on meaning which is beneath the surface, just like a pun; this, by the way, is my excuse for the title of this post. And what is this hidden message? Don’t believe the lies that you see with your eyes; face up to your fears.

For all that, however, have faith. For that’s one thing they’ll never take away.

6 comments:

Helm said...

Excellent. Excellent. I'm so glad you're writing.

As an addition to the thoughts you've presented (and one I'll explore on Subculture in due time) I think the motivation of Psychotic Waltz (and other progressive metal bands) to portray this Gnostic-cruel-demiurge world where one plays but cannot win, where nothing exists and nothing was meant to be, is to focus on the inherent power of 'the one who realizes this truth', the cruel divinity of the solipsist. 'Nothing' had a profound effect on me when I took a closer look at it as a 17 year old person, not because it's a powerful Ideologic treaty, as you say, it's not, but because there's power in the revelatory tone of 'here is the truth'. Psychotic Waltz are like Deathrow, or many other technothrash bands in that their accusatory tone on the nature of modern reality underlines that there is an intelligent, lonely, distant "I" that makes the accusations. In there there is the potency of this music, the more complex, the more joyless, the more involved it gets, the more the "I" that summons these narratives grows stronger. And lonely is the death.

Helm said...

Which is why there can never be a second 'Social Grace' by middle-aged carreer musicians. One cannot love life and write such a record. In the interview portion you presented in your text, keep in mind that the band members go on about how 'you must return something you have borrowed from this lifetime' and how 'eventually you'll realize you struggled for the wrong things'. When is the time when the final count is done? When is the tragic revelation of meaninglessness? On death.

Nekromantis said...

Thanks for the excellent and insightful analysis. It has helped me to understand this album better. I've known it for few years and owned it for 6 months. I've always enjoyed it but at the same time been baffled with what it tries to say or show us. I think I've been on right track since you posted this piece. Not much has been written (at least on internet) about this album which is a shame because I think it really deserves more attention. If one goes for unique progressive metal this is a good place to start.

Also I want to thank you ZERO for namedropping Echo Us in this and your newest post. The persisting use of the band for example or comparition in both posts made me check out Tomorrow will tell... and it has proven itself to be very (emotionally) influential and therapeutic music for me.

Zero said...

@ Nekromantis: Thanks. Yes, Psychotic Waltz were always one of the more unique of the whole USPM-ish prog movement, and they're probably one of the bands that played a large part in me getting into progressive metal from USPM and the like. I think that at that stage, where my experience with prog was mainly bands along the lines of early Fates Warning, Crimson Glory and the like, Psychotic Waltz's debut had probably been my favourite album, since in some ways it did seem the most complex in a way which made it stand out from the rest.

I suppose that it could have to do with how their riffing imposes itself and becomes almost suffocating at times, something which allows a lot of effects which you couldn't find in the other bands. They're probably one of the bands which were closest to prog and furthest from the whole USPM side of things, and given that I now listen to prog and technothrash more than USPM, perhaps it revealed a bit more about my interests than I thought.

As far as Echo Us, yes, mentioning them seems to have developed into something of a persistent tic. Their album and APSoG seem to get pretty incessant mentions, probably because both are albums which I really ought to write about, but haven't yet, and therefore it seems that they make their way into the space which is supposed to be devoted to other bands. They're definitely an interesting band, though, especially on 'Tomorrow will Tell...', and I'm glad that they were helpful for you.

Nekromantis said...

"They're probably one of the bands which were closest to prog and furthest from the whole USPM side of things"

Yes I'd have to agree with this. I can definitely hear something about the band in early 90s progressive metal like Vauxdvihl or even Annon Vin. Not just in the riffing per se but in the way these bands focus in how the riffs should function within the music and the context to capture the feeling or "raison d'être" of the piece. Of course this dynamic interaction between the music and the "meaning" is an age old concept even in metal but not quite like Psychotic Waltz did it. The lyrical influence is there too I think. Or maybe it is that to express similar things in heavy metal you end up playing like this? And to be clear, I don't think that there were many if any bands that sounded exactly like PW but I feel it's safe enough to say that some were at least informed about them.

Zero said...

I definitely agree that the difference is to a large degree a matter of how the riffs are used within the music. That was probably unique among most bands which I had listened to at the time.

When it comes to other bands, there are definitely others which are influenced by Psychotic Waltz, but 'A Social Grace' still seems a pretty unique record. The reason I think this is that I've searched quite hard for bands similar to early Psychotic Waltz, and while I've found some pretty good bands in connection with them, such as Taramis, Psycho Symphony and Spiral Architect, they still seem quite distinct, in general. Psycho Symphony probably remind me more of Sider, while with bands like Spiral Architect, I think that while there are some similarities in the riffing styles, the riffs play quite different functions; in Spiral Architect and such, it often feels a lot more disjointed and schizophrenic, rather than having the suffocating effect that Psychotic Waltz does.

Later Psychotic Waltz (Into the Everflow, Bleeding, etc.) are still a strong band, and their lyric-writing remained very strong on 'Into the Everflow.' Nonetheless, these albums do seem a bit less 'special' than ASG, for lack of a better word; perhaps they don't feel as unified, or to have as coherent a message; maybe the more complex and long construction on 'Into the Everflow,' had made the songs into slightly too autonomous units, while 'Bleeding' is a bit of an assortment rather than having a unified theme.

Psychotic Waltz never seem to have wished to emulate 'A Social Grace,' and not many others have tried. Perhaps that's justifiable; given the close ties of ASG's music to its subject-matter, creating another ASG may have seemed redundant, and once the message had been communicated there wasn't much more to be said in that direction. Maybe that's why there's been such little emulation, too; most bands influenced seem to depart from ASG in subject and manner of presentation, and once that's done it's not perhaps clear what being close to ASG would involve.