I came across a comic the other day. Two panels. Very simple setup and punch line. A man is talking to his therapist and says, "I think my greatest fear is dying alone." The therapist, looking out the window of his office and seeing a mushroom cloud in the distance, replies, "Well, I have some good news..." It really sums up what living in America can feel like sometimes. The only silver lines we can expect to glean are those we glimpse on the threshold of unmitigated disaster. The title track from Detriot deathgaze duo Vazum's LP Western Violence is illustrative of this dreary state of reality. Through a veiling mirage of distortion billowing from the seams in a slithering, creaking, descending crawl of a chord progression, venomously sourced from guitarist Zach Pliska's own hands, singer Emily Sturm channels a viciously exacting personification of Romeo Void's Debora Iyall in recounting the fouling of human bodies and souls wrought by the opioid epidemic and its correlative with a rise in gun violence across the increasingly desolate expanses of the American West. There will be no retribution or restitution for the lives lost or the harm done for the sake of greed and cheap thrills depicted here- coordinated in cloud-kicking boardrooms and concluding in trash-glutted gutters and parking lots outside abandoned strip malls, dilapidated churches, and soon to be deserted schools- this long, tragic chapter of our nation's history will not have a poetic moment of justice- the people responsible made their paper, and the miserable details of the entailed crimes will be recorded in feeble ledgers and left to sit on back room shelves, molding until they succumb to the ravishes of moths and the inertia of indifference. The bleakness of the bare facts of this life makes the techno-dystopian fantasies of an AI-tailored tyranny depicted on tracks like the shadow-cast and subduedly operatic "Breach" refreshing in a feat of twisted irony, as there is yet a sense of resistance and defiance in Zach and Emily's bitter and resolute vocal deliveries as they outline a fictional web of control. If the hypothetical ever concretizes where Grok accelerates into the dispatcher of 10s of thousands of T-800-styled killer androids, there will be a clear focal point to which one may target their energy and fury in order to rest control back from a singular and centralized cybernetic dictatorship and restore a priorly displaced state of liberty, presumably enjoyed by humanity. In our present reality though, the evils we suffer seem to flow inherently out of systems and dynamics that operate entirely as intended, and as far back as we can recall... it's never been any other way. It is clear that the plain order of things privileges violence against us, and we are merely objects cursed to bear witness to a pertinacious ontological state upon which we are powerless to force an effective change. What is there to hold on to in this perverse demiurgic domain? Perhaps the answer is close at hand? We have each other, after all. Even in the well of hell's gullet, there is still the solace of company and we do not suffer alone. As indicated by Vazum's sweeping, sanguine-hued and honey-textured, Cocteau-coktail "Stellium," there is always someone with you in the dark- they may be as bloody, bruised and broken, but as long as their pulse runs quick, they will be there. There is a certain solidarity that the recognition of the other engenders. A sympathetic recognition of ourselves in the reflection of a shared humanity- a grain of love in a fallow field- and a glimmer of salvation cutting through a curtain of acid rain- a sunny day that drys the wet terror of an evening past- You see me, and I see you, and together we live in the light cast down into the shadows- splinters that form the silver lining of a rising mushroom cloud.
