There is a specter that lurks in the urban wastes of the Unites States. It haunts every rehabbed factory space that now sells artisan pizza and craft beer. It streaks down the thoroughfare of every new shopping corridor and hi-rise apartment development, screaming silent bloody screams into the night. It tails every rideshare. Its sits with you, looming over your shoulder as you enjoy a vegan, gluten-free pasta with your partner in a rehabbed bank that sits by a river that once was a means of shipping goods all over the world, but now is just another body of water that marketing executives and bankers have claimed for boating and drinking White Claw. It glares at you from under the brim of a tattered baseball cap and over a torn cardboard sign as you take the on-ramp to the highway back to your miserable apartment in what was once a Ukrainian Church. It is an apparition that the urban poor must maneuver around in their daily struggle to survive, but that more privileged individuals pass through like it was made of air. The shade that haunts these places is the spirit of homelessness, housing insecurity, and displacement. It thrives in high population density spaces and ensures that those who toil in these areas never know a restful sleep. This spectral malady is one of a stew of rancid spiritual torpor that seeps up through our society's cracks and is part of a foul legacy left by the United States Government's failed public housing projects and initiatives.
Hamstrung from their inception by racists and vicious protestant moralists, Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, and other developments across the nation shared space in the minds of your average middle-class idiot with the distant warzones they heard about on the news, or dens of serial killers that they read about in pulp graphic novels. The reality was much different. Public housing in the 20th Century was just that. Housing. Places where people lived. Working people are treated as disposable in this society, and it has always been a fact that the wages they earn do not adequately cover the expenses of living, in even substandard conditions, in most urban environments. Public housing was meant to correct for these moral and economic failures, but the project was quickly discarded by government officials who instead sought to punish the people living in these spaces for their poverty. The proceeding decades since the Government abandoned and then depopulated and destroyed its housing projects (in that order) have seen a collective amnesia overtake the popular imagination. Hardly a word is spoken about the programs and structures that were once synonymous with tales of urban terror and suburban flight. The people who lived in these sacrifice zones remember though, and they still have tales to tell.
Come and See is the third album from the experimental black metal project Mamaleek. It is inspired by the lived experiences and public perceptions of band's central members, brothers who perform and record anonymously. The brothers grew up in the public housing projects of their native California, and from a young age, were well aware of the way the world saw them and the place they lived. More specifically, Come and See is about Cabrini-Green and the way it scared the fabric of America's mind, poisoning all attempts at urban renewal that involved working and poor families for over half a century. The message of the album though, is applicable to the noxious public perceptions and incredibly Government failures of any and all of the public housing built in the post-war period.
While Mamaleek has always had an expansive sound, on Come and See they take a special interest in blues and jazz, which they present here in abstract form, pushed to chaotic limits. "Eating Unblessed Meat" has an unhinged and broken blues groove and an off-kilter rhythm reminiscent a half-drown Jesus Lizard, and "Cabrini-Green" features shifting percussion and upper-cutting and crashing melodies that combine to create some eerily dissident jazz. "Whites of the Eyes (Cowards)" begins with thumping heart percussion and a strained trumpet before transitioning into a shrieking march of terror, adding additional unnerving instrumentation as it progresses, while "Street Nurse" is a febrile, psychedelic nightmare. Come and See is the sound you hear while you stand in the long shadow of one of this country's most titanic failures: its hostile disinterest in meeting the most basic needs of its most vulnerable citizens.
