August Burns Red

Nature is known for camouflaging power. A great wave begins as a ripple; an iceberg hides its bulk under the surface. Nowhere is this more evident than what lies above us, behind the veil of the beautiful blue sky lies the infinite universe.

A closely guarded secret, In Hearts Wake’s third album Skydancer has been lying dormant for well over a year. Recorded alongside Earthwalker – In Hearts Wake’s award-winning ARIA Top Five sophomore album – in Michigan with Josh Schroeder (The Color Morale, King 810) in late 2013, the album is both a stunningly assured heavy record in its own right as well as a companion to its predecessor. What frontman Jake Taylor, guitarists Ben Nairne and Eaven Dall, bassist Kyle Erich and drummer Caleb Burton have unveiled is nothing short of the most ambitious and heartfelt album of 2015.

“The tracks on Earthwalker were more focused, personal, emotional and subjective,” says Taylor, “whereas the topics on Skydancer were written more from an eagle eye’s point of view on the broader issues of the world. It’s important to understand that both are very relative.”

The existence of Skydancer makes perfect sense when placed next to 2014’s Earthwalker – after all, with the earlier album focusing on the feminine beauty and unpredictable chaos of Mother Nature, the sometimes-dark masculine power of Father Sky brings everything into sharp contrast. The concept is drawn from the Native American creation myth that details the attraction and mutual dependence between the two. “Modern society currently treats the masculine and feminine worlds as very separate: from law to religion, social to political and from health to commerce,” notes Taylor. “As a species, we cannot survive or reproduce in harmony without the union of both, and this is the same sacred cycle found within nature. Earthwalker (the feminine) and Skydancer (the masculine) illustrate both worlds, and aim to bridge the connection.”

Hence the constant dialogue on Skydancer between the personal and the political, the intimate and the social. Our generation’s decisions will impact the planet – both positively and negatively – more drastically than arguably any other before us, so the need for people to be conscious of the systems that control us and how they affect us on a human level is huge. These issues affect all of us, whether we like it or not. Our choice is whether or not to be conscious, whether or not to fight back.

This battle reached Taylor’s own doorstep, as he recounts in ‘Cottonmouth’. His grandmother was ill in a nursing home, but it wasn’t clear what was causing her more pain – the illness, the neglect or the medication? “Twenty-odd pills a day to combat her rapidly deteriorating physical condition. Each pill produced a side effect that required a prescription by the other. Behind Western medicine there’s a pharmaceutical war being waged by multi-billion dollar corporations, churning profit at the expense of others. I symbolised the pharmaceutical evil with the deadly Cottonmouth viper. It is said that the white lining of the snake’s mouth is the last thing victims will see.”

Lead single ‘Breakaway’ perfectly encapsulates the harsh realities of man’s inhumanity to both man and planet, takes on those who seek to profit from mass murder on an industrial scale. “Compared to tracks on Earthwalker it’s more rigid, punchier, faster, and aggressive, which for me sparked the need to speak about the harsh shadows of war and those that financially fuel it – a fragmented figment of the masculine psyche.”

The genesis of the project came when the band collectively reached breaking point. Touring for the sake of touring wasn’t enough, and something had to change. “We found ourselves asking the question, what is it all for?” remembers Taylor. “This was the turning point that we needed to create a real purpose to get out of bed for (or off the floor in the case of touring). At the source of it all, we just love feeling healthy and getting outdoors – it’s exhilarating. So we wanted to create a side that would stand for what we loved and believed in. No longer were we spectators, we wanted to be a part of the bigger picture so that one day our children might (hopefully) enjoy the Earth as much as we did.”

Any journey begins with a single step. In Hearts Wake might be idealists but they also know how to express those ideals in real terms; just as through the course of the ‘Earthwalker’ campaign they planted 1,379 trees and revitalised a small patch of the planet in the process, with Skydancer they’re seeking to make even more of a difference.

By working with non-profit organisation Economics Of Happiness they are combating the creeping insidiousness of globalisation by working to promote local economies and produce. “There are over seven billion people out there, so at the end of the day we can only make a small difference to the bigger picture,” smiles Taylor. “But hey – it’s still a difference! If more and more people become aware of the real issues at hand rather than who won the latest talent quest, then the difference will start to grow on a much larger scale. We’d like to prove to both ourselves and the world, that if a bunch of average dudes from a tiny coastal town in the most isolated country in the world can make a difference, then anyone can.”

In Humor and Sadness, the debut album from ’68, demonstrates the loud beauty of alarming simplicity. A guy bashing his drums, another dude wielding a guitar like a percussive, blunt weapon while howling into a mic somehow manages to sound bigger and brasher than the computerized bombast of every six-piece metal band. A splash of roots, a soulful yearning for mid century Americana and the fiery passion of post punk ferocity rampages over a record of earnestly forceful tracks like a runaway locomotive.

Josh Scogin wasn’t out of elementary school when the Flat Duo Jets laid their first album down on two tracks in a garage. But the scrappy band’s spirit of raw power, punchy delivery, tried-and-true rhythms and urgent sense of immediacy is alive and well in ’68.

Heralded by Alternative Press as one of 2014’s Most Anticipated Albums, In Humor and Sadness is a snapshot of a fiery new beginning for one of modern Metalcore’s most celebrated frontmen. Produced by longtime Scogin collaborator Matt Goldman (Underoath, Anberlin, The Devil Wears Prada), the first full offering from ’68 is a broad reaching slab of ambitious showmanship delivered with few tools and fewer pretensions. The scratchy disharmonic pop of Nirvana’s Bleach is in there, for sure. And while many associate the setup with The Black Keys, ’68 is more like Black Keys on crack.

“I wanted it to be as loud and obnoxious as it can be,” Scogin explains. “I want it to be in-your-face. I want people who hear us live to just be like, ‘There’s no way this is just two dudes!’ That became sort of the subplot to our entire existence. ‘How much noise can two guys make?’ It’s obviously very minimalistic, but in other ways, it’s very big. I have as many amps onstage as a five piece band. Michael only has one cymbal and one tom on his kit, but he plays it like it’s some kind of big ’80s metal drum setup. It’s minimalistic, but it’s also overkill. We get as much as we can from as little as we can.”

Like many pioneers, North Carolina’s the Flat Duo Jet’s blazed a trail for more commercially successful people. They played rootsy rockabilly but with a punk edge. Band leader Dexter Romweber’s solo work was a fist-pounding celebration of audacity and disruption, which influenced the likes of The White Stripes, among other bands.

“I got excited when I thought about the distress, the chaos that this two-piece arrangement would create – one guy having to provide all of these sounds, with a bunch of pedals, with certain chords wigging out and missing notes here and there,” he says with excitement. “That alone makes up for the chaos of having five people up there.”

That idea of less is more, of building something big from something small, persists today at the top of the charts with The Black Keys, just as it’s lived and breathed in the bass-player-less eclectic trio Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the rule-breaking early ’90s destruction of Washington D.C.’s Nation of Ulysses, and in the two man attack of ’68.

“Jon Spencer’s records always sound like he’s kind of winging it and I love that,” declares Scogin, letting out an affectionate laugh. “In my last band, that’s how we tried to make our last record feel. The excitement and imperfection is something I love to draw from.”

Before paring (and pairing) things down with friend and drummer Michael McClellan, Josh Scogin was the voice, founder and agitprop-style provocateur in The Chariot, who laid waste to convention across a brilliantly unhinged and defiantly unpolished catalog of Noisecore triumphs and dissonant art rock rage. Recorded live in the studio, overdub free, The Chariot’s first album set the tone for a decade to come, owing more to a band like Unsane than whatever passes for “scene.”

Scogin was the original singer for Norma Jean and left an influential imprint on the burgeoning Metalcore of the late 90s that persists today, despite having fronted the band for just one of six albums. Whether it’s the genre-defining heft of Norma Jean’s first album or the five records and stage destroying shows of The Chariot, there’s a single constant at the heart of Josh Scogin’s career: a familiarity with the unfamiliar.

A new Metalcore band would be a safe third act for the subculture lifer, but Scogin isn’t comfortable unless he’s making himself (and his audience) uncomfortable. “I definitely wanted to flip the script a bit,” he freely confesses. “I’ve always wanted to play guitar and sing in a band, ever since I left Norma Jean. I needed the freedom of not having a guitar onstage, but now having done that for several years, I wanted the challenge.”

Creative problem solving has long been the name of the game for Scogin, whether he was hand stamping ALL 30,000 CDs for The Chariot’s Wars and Rumors of Wars album or figuring out how to pull off his ’68 song title concept in the digital age of iTunes. Each song on In Humor and Sadness was to be titled with simply a single letter, which when put together vertically on the back of a vinyl LP or compact disc, would spell out a word. However, it’s problematic to name more than one song with the same letter, which would have been necessary to spell out what he intended.

’68 is the forward thinking progress of an artist who finds satisfaction in the expression of dissatisfaction. There’s progression in this regression. Tear apart all of the elements that have enveloped a singer’s performance, strap a guitar on the guy and set him loose with nothing but a beat behind him? It’s a recipe for inventive, fanciful mayhem.

After a raucous debut at South By Southwest, a full US tour supporting Chiodos and many more road gigs on the horizon, Scogin and McClellan are propelled by the excitement that comes along with the knowledge that ’68 is truly just getting started.

“We’ve just broken the tip of the iceberg. We’re really just exploring all the different things we can do,” Scogin promises. “I’ll get more pedals, we’re try different auxiliary instruments, whatever – the goal is to challenge ourselves and challenge an audience.”