Peace Trials, maybe, but last time I saw Chris Kites onstage, dude was covered in his own blood. Can't say I remember the sound, so who knows the precise peace content (there were razorblades), but that was also three years ago; these days, sonically speaking, Kites and his political rage have gone from man vs. himself to man vs. his own machine, following the peace sign-shaped tracks of Henry Barnes (Amps For Christ) and Jessica Rylan (Can't).
Still, the impulse is sharp: "Flag Torn Apart" would be painful, if the handmade sound system didn't quit and thrust the vocals back into the primeval static from which they came. A mere control on raw analog noise, the pseudo-raging voice processes the synth bleat and modulated round tones until it's inarticulate. Colin Langenus, half of the equally loving and raging USAISAMONSTER, pulled the same trick recently on his own recent solo record, creating comedy and incomprehensible static from genuine feeling; the actual music's gone subliminal.
"Exploded Face" gets down to business as far as non-violent chirpy violence goes, maybe call it brutal noise for beginners, and the redundant "True" revisits earlier sequenced noise-box lines, this time bled low against a reluctant, pulled-right-out-of-the-machine and moaning high end. But, to borrow a phrase, most of Peace Trials is a song against itself: death imagery sung in harmony, palindromic vocals working the middle from both sides, crackling transistor warmth merging with the human version of same.
Sex and pessimism in the ears, sure, but it's love and drugs on the floor. Kites' got that figured, and his message only benefits from his inability to articulate it; I prefer "Dirt's" "On and On and On/ No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No" to anybody's righteous breakdown. The most introspective song on here, "Peace Trials", is a duet with Erin Rosenthal from the Provi psych band Urdog, and it also just nods at the crux: "Master's voice/ Radiates/ Peace Trials/ Peace Trials." Let somebody else figure out the specifics.
There is an undeniable provincialism at work here-- one song quotes Three Studies for a Crucifixion, a mid-1990s Ohio hardcore band adopted in New England as the region's own-- and in many ways Peace Trials speaks as well for that kind of regional solidarity as anything in recent memory. The mix of distracted psych, gritty electronics, self-made machines that don't work half the time, and a mostly implied ultra-left politic feels as much like another day in Providence as it does like music. The aural-journalism lays bare an elusive sentiment in the city's abandoned lofts. Maybe meaningless, but at least it's correct.
