As even the smallest corners of daily life get increasingly cluttered, I find myself reaching for streamlined and straightforward music, things that remind me of what I was listening to before I had an email address. It's not nostalgia, really-- it's finding ways to simplify and navigate the present. For the past few months it's been a certain kind of hardcore, metal, and punk, both older (Tragedy, Dystopia, Stormcrow), newer (Disfear, Trap Them), and 2012 modern. As far as the most recent stuff, Black Breath's Sentenced to Life and the Split Cranium LP do the trick, as does True Predation, the second album from Struck by Lightning. Like Split Cranium-- which features Aaron Turner from Isis and Jussi Lehtisalo of Circle dialing things up a bit-- this Columbus, Ohio, quartet isn't your "typical" punk group. They do, however, stick close enough to the script to remain perfectly familiar.
Struck by Lightning feature vocalist and guitarist Gregory Lahm, who previously played in the Dayton post-metal group Mouth of the Architect, a band that stretches atmospheric sludge compositions beyond the 10-minute mark with the help of keyboards and samples. You don't get that here, but you do get subtle "progressive" and other unexpected elements working their way into the mix: the backward loops at the end of "Sickening Reality"; the dark and almost black metal tones of "Rabid Hysteria"'s opening guitars; the icy, avalanching implosions on "Slavocracy". In some respects, they're a bit like Josh Smith's post-Weakling band Futur Skullz, a Bay Area trio that deals in super-techy riffs over full-throttling. In both cases you get a real sense of experience and a varied résumé adding distinctive moments to a genre too often about line-toeing-- it's clear these aren't kids banging it out in a basement.
There are flourishes-- basically traces of something broader outside the frame-- but don't look too far into it: The band is mostly focused on angry, dirty, d-beat. They're good at this sort of thing, and they're getting better. Their 2009 debut, Serpents, didn't feel complete to me. It was tentative in some ways, uninterestingly ambitious in others; it wasn't full enough, and it didn't feel resolved. Here, they've slowed things down, streamlined their songwriting, cut back on the ambient wanking, axed the piano, added a sludgier vibe, and have let grim and frosty influences slip into the mix. (You can't really compare them to early Mastodon now, which is a good thing.) Last time it was 11 songs in 46 minutes. Here, it's 10 in 33. They have more momentum, piss, and bile. You still get the shout-along choruses, heavy bass, and rolling drums, but producer Eric Cronstein's made it a dense, pristine swamp of crust and muck. He also got the vocals to sound rawer, murkier, and twice as huge.
Good bands change and refine what they do over time; it's not surprising I wasn't moved by Serpents and find myself returning to this one regularly. What's more unexpected is how life-affirming True Predation is-- very much in spite of itself. I'll bet a song titled "We Are All Just Rotting Corpses" isn't the most chipper thing you'll come across today, nor is the refrain of "fuck you forever" on "Mindfucker" or "no fucking future" in "Slavocracy" or the very idea of an "Extinction Event", but there's something compelling about the raw honesty of Struck by Lightning's straight-up, pissed-off catharsis. And, you know, it's also just satisfying to see a band trim the fat and wind up even bigger.
