Today Is the Day
Temple of the Morning Star

Strange creature, Today is the Day by Steve Austin. Personally speaking, I've never managed to pin them down precisely. The most suitable label to describe them is perhaps "out-of-control music."

Furious and rabid incarnations abound within the varied context of extreme metal. Everyone does their utmost to be noticed, imposes themselves with a well-defined identity, and establishes themselves by virtue of consistency, but then regularly ends up trapped within the narrow confines they have set for themselves: no matter how wild and daring one might be (or believes themselves to be), rarely do neuroses, discomfort, and existential turmoils remain strong and vigorous over the long term. More often, those traits prove over time to be nothing more than a false mask, a pose for its own sake.

For Today is the Day, this game doesn’t apply: listening to them, you always get the impression that Steve Austin loses control of himself and that his music is at risk of derailing at any moment towards unanticipated shores (which then promptly happens). In a world of budding madmen, I feel I can say that Austin probably does have a few screws loose (and just look at his maniacal face!).

How to frame, in particular, the Today is the Day of "Temple of the Morning Star," regarded by many as their masterpiece? In this 1997 album, the sounds become overall smoother and more mature than before, anarchism and uncontrolled chaos give way to a more cerebral attitude and a more lucid and surgical madness, while real speed appears sporadically, if at all. As if to say, it’s not exactly an easy listen, one that, far from boasting pretentious intellectualism, at the same time does not lend itself to satisfying the base instincts of the most voracious devourers of molten metal.

From grindcore, we could say, it inherits the context of deconstruction in which various sound debris float (seventeen plus a ghost-song which will be a succulent surprise for real music enthusiasts!): samples and shards of frenzied metal succeed melodic interludes and decidedly complex compositions, where the excellent technical qualities of the three musicians are paraded: Mike Hide's thunderous and unpredictable drumming, Chris Reeser’s bass and keyboards, and not least, Austin's invertebrate guitar, which effortlessly traverses from punk outbursts to thrash assaults, noise excursions, and intricate sonic masturbarions reminiscent of Fripp. All contaminated by a series of intros, recordings, monologues, and brief cinematic extracts wedged between tracks, raising the disease rate of the entire package.

Many might think it's extreme metal for hipsters. And indeed, compared to those who've undergone the ancient Venom-Slayer-Celtic Frost-Sepultura-Napalm Death-Carcass-Morbid Angel boot camp, it's more likely that those who approached metal with the "Black Album" and rapidly transitioned to various Pantera, Korn, TOAD, Dillinger Escape Plan, and Strapping Young Lad would get excited about Today is the Day.

In fact, although they’re not exactly newcomers (they've been around since 1992), Today is the Day undertake a process of skeletonizing sounds that ends up stripping old metal of all those frills that the new generations of metal consider useless embellishments inherited from a now obsolete past (guitar solos being the prime example). Yet, upon closer inspection, there is nothing cheesy in Today is the Day’s music, and Austin must be recognized for his out-of-the-ordinary talent, at least within extreme metal: an unrepeatable formula, perhaps because it isn’t a formula at all but the unconditioned expression of an irrepressible artistic potential in constant eruption.

The initial "Temple of the Morning Star (Acoustic)," for example, is an acoustic ballad, and even from it, one can tell something doesn't add up ("I can't be what you want me to be, I am dead" chant the desolate lyrics, foreshadowing the album's themes and reiterating those of Austin's art in general: the sense of inadequacy, frustration, the inability to focus on reality, despair, therefore, and the uncontrollable fury, against oneself and others, that follow).

A country tune follows (Johnny Cash?) called upon to pay/scoff at the musical tradition of its homeland (Nashville), immediately overshadowed by an orgy of delirious sounds: "The Man Who Loves to Hurt Himself" is a jumble of riffs intertwined into balls that don't incite pogoing, don’t exude violence but only frustration, eventually transmitting a disturbing sense of paranoia and alienation.

It’s Austin’s voice, truly, the real disturbing element of Today is the Day: his voice is the voice of a mad murderer. In the rending friction of his effect-laden screams, there isn't the theatricality of a budding pseudo-neurotic trying to win the favor of a pseudo-neurotic generation, but only the anger and anguish of a depressed person who hasn’t yet figured out if the solution to their problems is murder or suicide. So much desire to kill, therefore, in these notes, but also a lot of desire to die.

Killer yells and morbid self-flagellant wails describe, without even too much self-pity, the boundaries of a mind on the verge of collapse. Satanism, splatter-porn-gore themes join with hymns of uncontrolled hatred and pathetic cries for help, signals of an irreparable fragility and fractures that mark an essenced soul. It’s the discomfort born from the repression of natural life impulses, translated into psychosis, hypersensitivity, schizophrenia, persecution delusions, materializing in violence against others or self-harm: in any case with the loss of self-control.

Steve Austin, with real conviction, reinterprets through the language of extremes the fury and fragility of Trent Reznor and the anti-system whims of a clown like Marilyn Manson, standing as a bard of a desperate America on the verge of psychic catastrophe. Before being extreme, Austin is an artist who has something to say, and for this, his art should not be ridiculed just because others surpass it in violence and speed.

"Kill Yourself,” opened by a distorted arpeggio, is just one of the early signs of an impending mental and thus sonic disaggregation. In the second part, the album goes crazy and derails among "grunge ballads" ("Mankind"), dark manifestations of emotional degradation ("Pinnacle"), grind outbursts ("Crutch"). In "Root of All Evil," it sounds like listening to the Devil-possessed Primus, while episodes unfold in total discontinuity, between guitar masturbarions ("Satan is Alive," "Rabid Lassie") and surprising melodic outbursts (the acoustic "Friend for Life," "I See You"). The distorted bass, chimes, Austin’s morbid voice of "Hermaphrodite" represent the more esoteric side of Today is the Day’s music, a not secondary component in Austin’s artistic vision (see, for example, that concentrate of hatred and blasphemous fury that is "In the Eyes of God," the 1999 album).

And I must say, it’s seldom while listening to an album that I think “what the hell is happening?” and at the same time find active interest in me regarding the potential evolutions the musical discourse might take. No discourse in reality, but just sketches flung out with unprecedented violence from the fertile womb of a sick mind: the chaotic impulses of a madness that does not know how to contain itself but finds coherence in itself.

A madness that, however, over time reveals itself capable of lyrical leaps, as happens in the concluding "Temple of the Morning Star," which reprises the theme that opened the album. But when the distorted notes of the guitar and Austin’s desperate singing envelop you, it will already be too late for you, captured and cloistered in the world of madness of Today is the Day... I can't be what you want me to be, I am dead...