Alunared, The Death Birds

So I'm sitting here eating a cold samosa and lukewarm curry, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, and listening to this, Alunared's first album. Sweet Jebus, but this takes me back. Yep, this is going to be another one of those long, rambling, and perversely personal reviews that are more about time and place than music.

I was still relatively new to Vancouver when I first heard Alunared. I pretty much stayed hidden in my room, renting "The Seven Samurai" and the countless other movies I promised myself I'd watch someday. The downtown eastside still shocked and amazed me, now it just depresses me. I went to work, came home, read, fucked around online, went to bed, repeat. More than anything, I just didn't go out much. I didn't know anyone, and exploring Vancouver without any defined program or plan of attack seemed insurmountably difficult.

A friend convinced me to come and check out some band she'd been emailing. They sounded pretty cool from what she told me: "Industrial-punk. You'll like them. You like this sort of thing." I showed up at Ms. T's Cabaret late. Ms T's was an ages old drag-queen bar whose décor can only be described as akin to your grandparents rec-room. The owners let bands book the place for free, so when it wasn't featuring sixty year old queens, it was full of indie kids. It was always ridiculously hot and humid there, and the old dude who bussed tables had to be well over seventy and had the world's skinniest legs. Apparently he performed in the drag show when we weren't there, but I don't know who (if anyone) he imitated. A few months ago, Ms. T's and the entire block it was on burned to the ground.

Like I said, I showed up late. Alunared were in the death throes of their last song when I came in. I don't remember what the music sounded like, but the drummer (who I believe was wearing a Mexican wrestling mask) was in the middle of kicking over and pummelling an oil drum or two, which looked to be the only instrument he was equipped with. The singer was on the floor of the stage, writhing spasmodically and seemingly wrestling with the mic and its cord. The couple of dozen kids watching were either cheering loudly or looking confused and perturbed. "Shit yea," I thought. "Isn't this the sort of stuff you move to the city for?"

Since then I've seen the band countless (ie, somewhere in the area of twenty) times, interviewed them, been there, done that, literally bought the t-shirt. So, what's left to say about "The Death Birds", the band's first album?

A fair bit, really. The buzz around the album when it came out in the summer of 2001 was that its veneer of dead-cold meat synths, guttural bass guitar ramblings and screamed paranoid fragments aptly recalled Cold War tensions. I actually wrote the words "Orwellian visions of the future" in reference to this album. What the hell was I thinking? A few months later when "everything changed", "The Death Birds" wasn't really on my mind. Two years have passed since then, though, and with perpetually changing reasons for a perpetual war, the album sound less like an art-rock experiment in how to clusterfuck people's conceptions of genres as it does a soundtrack to our cycles of rage to helpless apathy and back:

"we can stick to the same principles.
we can construct walls up and about ourselves.
yet the bodies in the chairs still don't believe it's sitting there in front of them.
this cross-section of bastard histories.
repeat at random:
"i won't allow it."
"i can't allow it."
brother brother brother
can you take the screen off my head?
sister sister sister
we refuse to believe it's even happening today."

The cover of "The Death Birds" features a polarised photo of Christ Church Cathedral on Burrard, eclipsed by a jagged, ominously nameless office skyscraper. I can see that skyscraper from my window right now. Nothing changes. Everything changes.

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