ANTONIUS BLOCK – I dated the devil
(CD, Trost)
The first sounds on this CD are a guitar lick that
sounds like Steve Albini playing a minimal ripoff of Angus Young and me
thinks “Me likey”. Then the female singer says “I was dating the
devil, for way too long, We spend to much time together, I broke off his
horns.” And on and on in a mixture of nursery rhyme and new New York-ish
noiserock that I think “If they keep up this Patti Smith doing Karen O
during most parts of the record and convince me that they can pull if off
live as well, I might contemplate going to shows again.” Yes, Antonius
Block does that to you, jumping to conclusion and fast forwarding your own
thoughts, so you jump ahead of yourself unable to rewind or remember how you
wound up where you are now. Where are we now?
I see planerides, dhingy rehearsal rooms, notebooks
with plenty of scribbles and art shows. I haven’t seen the Ingmar Bergman
movie “The Seventh Seal” from 1957 but it sounds impressive. Aknight
comes back from a crusade and in the face of religious craze, pest and pain
meets death in person. So they play chess and as long as the game takes, the
knight may live on and search for god. The game of chess as a symbol for the
neverending search for god aka meaning in live aka something to hold on to
while being lost in space. The same issues then, back in the 14th
century and right here and now. If god is dead and satan is dead, then the
only deity left over (at least in western religions) is death. And at the
end, death always wins. What did you expect? A happy end?
This life is mainly about pain, as mankind has known
for a few thousand years, and why should it be any different now. Just
yesterday I read an article that said our society is heading back into a new
medieval time. Most people treat electricity, television, computers and the
internet as magical things, obeying their entire lives to them as if they
were necessary without understanding anything about them. A rich class of
elite citizens is building, who have all the rights, money and power (the
latter two being equal eventually) and a mass of de-powered people kept in
chains and slaving their lives away for the bare necessities of living.
Generation practicant is just a starting point.
That seem to be focal points in the way Tina Schule
perceives the word as well, or so I guess. Antonius Block revolves around
the lyrics of Schule and the unique guitar work of Jorge Docouto Parreira
with changing drummers and sometimes bass players and the will to keep
things simple, small, changing, challenging and meaningfull. Musically
Antonius Block ride a happy horse. They dangle into math rock and noise rock
usually connected to the dark urban city canyons of New York without losing
that nice and friendly lo-fi atmosphere. Recorded by Steve Albini this could
be a killer band, or sounding like a bunch of others, because at the moment
they are keeping it true to what three people can do on stage as well. More
production means more lying. So more like Dogma-movie than Bergman after
all?
