Standard logic holds that punks hate hippies and hippies don't get punks. But the differences have often been tenuous, and-- in a year when Sonic Youth could have conceivably hung backstage with moe. after their respective Bonnaroo sets-- the argument seems to be as superficial as a preference for patches. After all, in the end, isn't it all about fucking the man and making the world better for hanging out?
The USA Is a Monster-- the Brooklyn duo of multi-instrumentalists Colin Langenus and Thom Hohman-- are the dudes most daringly dancing over the spliff-thin line between bordering subcultures, the bros most brazen with their veggie burritos and schizophrenic record collections. They're Akron/Family with different screws loose and altered mores in the foreground: Like Crosby, Suzuki, Rollins & Young in halves, they roar in confrontational salvos before drifting into pastoral hums, those bents occasionally merging in the form of technical but jarring prog-and-psyche excursions. Sonic vacillation aside, The USA's dual curse-the-present, idealize-the-future memes dovetail with such hybridization. Over three full-length albums, The USA Is a Monster have gone punk on the politicos and their predecessors while honoring the hopeful future they project-- all in an espoused mutual love for both poles of Black Flag and young Grateful Dead.
The duo's third Load Records LP, Sunset at the End of the Industrial Age, is the fullest realization of that bridged aesthetic-- yet, anyway. As punks, they're indignant and informed: On the rhythmically staggered guitar-and-drum opener "The Greatest Mystery", Hohman (sounding a bit like Trey Anastasio) opines, "You build your wealth upon things you own." It's a mantra with precedents from Ghandi to Bad Religion, but here it comes with evidentiary namechecks: Hohman demands a new familiarity with Native American scholars Ward Churchill and Vine Deloria and references failures of institutional social Darwinism. But the subsequent line-- "If the power grid suddenly fell apart, could you walk a new road with an open heart?"-- begs from hippy rhetoric. Talk about rivers, rainbows and an idyllic future does much the same.
Likewise, the 13-minute title track moves slowly through six phases, opening with a marimba and synthesizer drone before pounding into tumultuous thrash, like drums rattling inside of a blender. In unison they belt: "And when the sun sets/ And the Western powers fade/ The lights go out [first political, now visionary…] and the stars will be so clear/ A naked land deforested/ A white blanket of snow." It sidesteps into a halcyon acoustic melody, industry's engine stopping and snow melting in a moment suitable for the eyes of the world. The clash returns, but, in time, the tonic battles it back, an infinite, self-sustaining conclusion manifested for a text-painting triumph.
Polar tracks like this, though, set up impossibly difficult notions: Sunset is rife with the sense that The USA hasn't yet reached its on-album potential. "It's a Beautiful Thing (I Like My Oranges Peeled For Me)" awkwardly ricochets between shifty math and a spoken-word, synthesizer-and-drum midsection about urban debauchery, largesse and lethargy, while the 46-second "Wine Country Cracker Blues" does the same with barely comprehensible talk about white cancer, white crack and white AIDS. The tailing "How We Are Livin' (It's Not the Scripture, It's the Mass)" gets jangly, quiet, domineering and, ultimately, only frustrating. Live, such bursts and transitions from vehemence to vision-- musically illustrated with fury and finesse-- work to USA's advantage. But, sustained over a pointed album directed for an audience's self-awareness, it's as taxing as it is teasing, setting up ideas just to sell them short for less provocative bookends. It's like an impassioned hippy and a haranguing punk simultaneously speaking on capitalism, saying the same things with different tones and ends: There's plenty worthy of action, but-- by diatribe's end-- no one knows what's happening, anyway.
