Rollins Band
The Only Way to Know for Sure

THE REVIEW

Whether you're stuck in traffic or in a condo meeting, even within you there might be a Henry Rollins ready to explode at any moment with his lysergic/logorrheic rants, like it or not darling... you'll have to have the courage of the conscious, because there are far too many desperates here, and after a while, they expire.

You will be asked to scream, to rant, to tell everything and everyone to go to hell.
You will be asked to ignore everything you've managed to build, because it will all have to be redone, because it's all wrong.

This is not a Live, it is a relic to the posterity of Punk, so screw all the half disappointments of Weight (1994) or Nice (2001), screw all those who break and lament the hardcore of Black Flag.

"The Only Way to Know for Sure" (2002) speaks for itself, it speaks of Rollins.
A title like that doesn't even need comments, 28 tracks made of feedback and metallic clamor of Wilsonian hallucinatory guitars, howling at the moon among hard lashes, lysergic orgasms, and boiling stasis of fire.

A compact and dynamic sound, condensed into a lethal war machine, untangles through the meanders and shortcuts of a journey, where destinations and experiences are not the goal, but the means to what truly matters, AWARENESS and CONSCIOUSNESS.

Everything in full command with an almost paroxysmal verbosity of a leader who weaves psychedelic bridges between the neurons of a psyche tortured by spasmodic and terrifying tensions.
A thin hallucinatory balance between blues, funk and visceral rock that in a fierce and violent Hardcore, blends the foundations of a voodoobilly variegated by lacerating psychedelic drifts.
 
It's easy to be tough while lying on your home couch.
What do you really feel!?
What is that impulse you can't dominate, that grinds the reins within which you have harnessed, or have been harnessed.
It suffocates you, pierces you, gnaws at your flesh, cuts it, afflicts it, exfoliates you; a deep nihilistic and misanthropic hatred, that despite the pretty impositions and bans continues to burn.
It burns the flame of your essence and doesn't stop tearing apart your heart.
What you are listening to is what you are?
I will be the Maudit, the Jake La Motta who in his frantic nightmares will evoke the Freudian thanatos in the violence of the bestiality of that disruptive element, an essential component out of the mediocre bourgeois life you've cowardly constructed, the Over-Man.
It will be him who consecrates you to God.

Rollins' beastly scream leaves no escape, it enters the soul, it is a caged animal that screams the inconsistency of its own soul, spits venom, dramatizes, acts a part at the limits of a Pirandellian classic.
Misanthropic, hates, afflicted, furious, damned, fights and screams, louder and louder, sincere, breathless, but no one listens, there is fear, people are lazy! people are afraid! ... so screw them then!

The only solution to life is solitude, mine! From a world that doesn't understand, that you can't fight, that you just have to traverse, endure, because like everyone, your moment will come to go to hell, but you damned bastard will go down with me!.
And what will you have resolved!?! ...people will continue in their damned indifference, inconsistency, ignorance.

Music has now broken the levees, the flames flow, thickened in an incandescent fluid that leads inexorably towards the bottom, towards the end, while the soul is illuminated by the immense, burns and fuels the flame of life...