Oroku
Living Through The End Time

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another."

-Robert Oppenheimer, recalling the Trinity test

It starts with the sound of strings, the nervous and frantic notes of a cello, getting faster, closer, igniting. Then it's the weight of the sky collapsing completely onto your shoulders.

In the late '70s, the newborn punk rock was already falling apart. Besides all the poor souls who, with genuine attitude and eagerness, lived in the shadow of much more plastic (no need to specify, I imagine), there was another world, dark, unsettling, and uncompromising. There were the Crass and with them the Anarcho and Crust Punk movements (Two expressions that still indicate the same things in many cases today). Stuff with a truly devastating impact, revolutionary styles, free, uncompromising. While the music was becoming increasingly extreme in various ways, the lyrics were becoming darker, more mature, or just more angry and direct. Dark, uncompromising genres of increasing gloom and violence were taking shape. As if the volume was being raised to cover the sound produced by the approaching Judgment Day.

It even seems strange that one can still talk about evolution and enrichment, but so it is. Crust has lately become even more dramatic and intense, sometimes adding adjectives before it to describe it better, "epic" or "dark" or even "atmospheric," stuff like that, in short, needless stuff.

This is the only work of this band, dated 2006 and who knows if it still exists somewhere outside the web. It is an effective example of how much certain music has evolved over the last two decades. "Crust With Strings" simple. Crust/Hardcore/Punk exceptionally dark, frantic and furious yet at the same time dramatic and resigned, with the use of a cello to make the atmosphere even more gloomy and suffocating. 

From the first note, it feels like you need an oxygen mask, the air is now toxic, unbreathable, the waters irreparably contaminated, the soil acidic. It's been years since the sunlight has laid on these places, life is slowly absorbed by a violent and corrosive vortex that spares no one. 

So yes, it is abrasive music, apocalyptic lyrics, voices boiling with anger and casting curses, now devoid of their humanity, a posthumous misanthropy. And no, if you're incurable optimists, don't come near this material.

It is something as heavy as the End of Times.