As a teenager, the driving force in my life was music. I used to wear my favourite CDs out by playing them too often, and would then just tie the scratched ones onto my backpack to give the band patches company. I even used shards of CDs as a source of texture and soul in a number of collages I obsessively pieced together. Not a moment went by when I wasn’t hiding behind my headphones, randomly bursting out with phrases from Nine Inch Nails songs, or idly scrawling my favourite lyrics all over my binders, notes, assignments, and tests. Music was what I breathed for.
Then when I was 21, I had what I can only describe as a crisis of self. My already tenuous grasp on social relations started slipping, I quit reading, and I somehow lost touch with the music. It was the balancing point of 2004 and 2005 when the reviews I used to write at least once a week stopped happening. There was a brief resurgence in 2006 that consisted of two, count ‘em, two reviews. I still listened, but I no longer participated. I stopped learning the names of songs, didn’t bother opening lyric books, and would only hum along to refrains whose words I had never learned.
These were all symptoms of a very dark time in my life, one that I have finally begun to leave behind me with the help of music. Most specifically, the music of one man.
I first met Steve Moore in 2006. I was 23 years old and was taken completely by surprise. To me, Inner Surge (the band he was fronting at that point) wasn’t just a Calgary band with a small local following. It was already one of the most important musical fixtures in my life. While much of what I listened to had fallen to the wayside, the raw and personal Solus Verum (a one-man-band demo) struck nerves in me that were otherwise dead.
The CD was never physically mine, so it moved to BC with an ex-roommate in 2005. I was content with the digital version until I accidently found Inner Surge’s Signals Screaming at the Southland Crossing Tramps. I had Solus Verum on my computer and Matrika on CD, but I’d never even thought to look up the band online and see what else they might have. When I took Signals Screaming home, something of the ice and apathy inside me started to melt. The music made sense in a way that nothing had for years. It gave me back a piece of my passion and solid ground to stand on. So of course I realized that I needed to once again get myself a physical copy of Solus Verum in order to feel whole. To the internet I went.
Let’s just say I wasn’t prepared for Moore’s unorthodox delivery style.
I was not expecting to be interrupted some weeks later in the middle of rinsing out some Manic Panic hair dye (red-wine burgundy in colour). Another soon-to-be-ex-roommate of mine yelled at me to get my ass downstairs and answer the door. Someone had buzzed up saying they had a delivery for me, and he apparently “didn’t sound like a delivery guy.” So with deep purple stains on my hands and my cheeks and wet hair dripping all over a shredded band shirt I should have thrown out years before, I headed downstairs.
As I made my way, I started to see just who was standing at the door. Black shoes first, black pants (denim?)… As one part of me wondered what delivery company wore a black uniform, something more primitive inside me understood and I nearly panicked. I had barely even seen pictures of Steve at that point, but I knew who would be standing at the door. Maybe a bit shorter than I’d expected, he was still standing there in all his glory: wiry muscles, dark brown goatee, short hair so dark it’s almost black, striking brown eyes. I had to force suddenly leaden feet to take me to the door.
Socially retarded at the best of times, I barely managed to even open the door without running screaming in the other direction. What do you say to someone whose music you have listened to for two years on an almost daily basis? In my case, not much. Not much at all. I mostly stammered and ducked my head and blushed and wished that I weren’t quite so purple and bedraggled.
Since Solus Verum was “only the demo,” Moore had brought with him a free copy of Signals Screaming. I didn’t have the heart (or, at that point, the tongue) to tell him I’d already bought a copy. And when he departed, delivery complete, I somehow made it upstairs before going hysterical.
I started going to Inner Surge’s shows in 2008, when An Offering was released. This was what started my journey into the local music scene: watching Steve Moore, Scott Taylor, Bryan Sandau, and…some dude on bass…up on the stage in the days before we lost The Underground. (Forgive me, but Moore goes through bass players like no one’s bloody business.) The weight and power of this politically fuelled music was incredible. Just my luck, this was just before the hiatus that proved to be Inner Surge’s end. Scott and Bryan went off to form Truck with Casey Rogers and Steve joined forces with Kenneth Buck to bring us Post Death Soundtrack, a pitch black yet playful industrial effort. Their debut album, Music as Weaponry, was the first piece of music that made me try to write again. (I tried; I failed, but it’s the trying that matter.)
At Post Death’s first Calgary show in December 2008 (an unfortunately postponed affair at The Stetson, where they cherish The Flames more than the musicians they have playing), Steve first brought up his “new project” to me. I smiled and nodded and pretended I knew what he was talking about. I am notoriously lacking in the attentiveness department sometimes, especially in recent years. I was so busy being in love with Post Death Soundtrack it never occurred to me that there was room for something else.
So it wasn’t until the summer of 2009 that I got around to downloading the demos by this project founded by Gustavo de Beauville, going by the name The Unravelling. I just recently listened to the demo versions again and am amazed at how solid they were. The production’s a little rough around the edges and there are some spaces in the soundscape that feel hollow compared to the lush finished product… But it’s easy to look back and see how the music created solely by de Beauville and Moore was able to nest so deeply in my mind. I have not gone more than a week in a row without listening to something by The Unravelling since that summer.
Today, it is Friday the 13th. And it was a year ago that 13 Arcane Hymns, The Unravelling’s first album, was released. Listening to the album, it’s almost impossible to believe that only three men were involved in the recording. Gus took it upon himself to do all the instrumental tracks and handle the engineering. Steve dealt out all vocals and harmonies with the full weight and clarity of his most powerful lyrics. Casey Lewis of The Evidence kindly guested on the drums and mixing/mastering. Live, their set included the familiar faces of Scott on guitar and Bryan on drums and…again, some dude on bass. (A note to “some dude”: I’m sorry I can’t remember your name(s).)
13 Arcane Hymns is a concept album, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the mid ‘90s. While the storyline isn’t as concrete as, say, David Bowie’s Outside, it is less abstract than Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral. It is about being buried alive, digging yourself back out, and ultimately persevering against all odds.
Artistically, I look at the buried alive concept both literally and metaphorically. My drawing hand likes the thought of musicians clawing themselves out of unmarked graves. The poet in me likes the million things those graves could ultimately represent. Metaphorically, then, the entire album is wonderfully self-inclusive; the ending Victory Song loops with perfect ease back into the opening Move Forward Until You Are Dead. The story becomes cycle, meeting obstacles and overcoming. The music is dark and heavy and beautifully empowering, uplifting, and other such words I never before thought I’d write about metal-edged music.
The music is, as mentioned already, absolutely lush. There are no empty spaces as the instrumentation goes from velvet smooth to sandpaper raw. It goes from machinegun fast-and-hard to soft and hesitant. Every time I listen, I have to remind myself that aside from the drums this was all one man. Most of the albums I own with a limited number of musicians on them are heavily electronic, not just one man with the talent to pull all the separate pieces together alone. One day, I need to find out how many instruments Gustavo de Beauville can play…
Moore comes over it with his baritone, singing harmonies on those perfect musical sweet-spots: the fifths and sevenths that evoke goose bumps even after the hundredth listen. As each song calls for it, there are fits of feral screams or deep-chested, finely controlled growls. Here is a man who knows what is enough; the perfect balance of decadence and decay for my finicky ears. His distortion of choice is the megaphone, which accompanies him to every live show.
The release of 13 Arcane Hymns officially and fully gave me back my music and my voice; I wrote my first review since 2006 for it.
A lot has happened in the year since the release. Two shows into their new career, in the middle of 2010, The Unravelling were down one live bassist and had brought home the first annual Alberta Metal Award for Best Album Production. In the fall, Steve had two incredible moments playing with genre heroes, first when Post Death Soundtrack opened for Front Line Assembly, and then when The Unravelling opened for Helmet. He recorded tracks with Truck and Cranial Collide that were officially released in October of 2010 and February of 2011. A video for Move Forward Until You Are Dead was directed by Doug Cook. … And in February, after one last show with a line-up from Fateless Empire, The Unravelling went on hiatus.
Because writing this incredible album that is distilled willpower, that is the struggle to go on, that is the want (the need) to survive, Moore may have been having a moment of prophecy. Or he may have already felt that something was wrong.
The reason for the hiatus was his diagnosis of colon cancer. At the age of 30, that is practically unheard of. With this hanging over his head, he would still not be deterred from playing his last two shows. The man has an iron will.
He has gone through treatments and surgeries (with one more on the horizon), and is now officially cancer free. I honestly don’t know if I believe it was the medical institution or his sheer personal fortitude that has seen him through to the other side.
While the question of what comes next for Moore, The Unravelling, and his music in general can’t be answered at this point in time, my own stubbornness has decided that there will be a victory show coming out of all this. Maybe in the fall, maybe in the winter?
Since 13 Arcane Hymns was so eerily prophetic, there is a live track-list I would like to see. Two songs to start with and two songs to end with; the rest can be played as they will.
To start:
• Victory Song: “I’m here for the return; I held my breath a long time. …Out from the fires, into the sky; victory! The phoenix flies.”
• Arjuna: “Out of my slumber, I become myself, laughing at the edge and laughing at hell. … Coming back with power!”
To end:
• Revived: “For so long, buried alive… Crawl my way back revived.”
• Move Forward Until You Are Dead: “I want the dead man to stand up. I am the dead man who stood up. … Move forward until you are dead.”
For those of you who don’t have 13 Arcane Hymns (shame on you!), head on over the The Unravelling’s official site to pick the digital version up for free. You can also purchase the physical copy, which has incredible tribalistic artwork, along with pics from the original photo shoot focused on the literal interpretation of the album: Gustavo and Steve covered in mud and blood in the graveyard, wearing funeral suits and smoking victory cigars.
Those pictures may have even inspired me a little…
So here’s to Steve Moore, who gave me back my voice and music. Here’s to Gustavo de Beauville, and to the future of The Unravelling. May the good music (and musicians) always live on, move forward, and endure.
