Authentic, despairing and optimistic - is the new SCATTERED ASHES EP All That Is Solid Melts Into Air a vital corrective for our troubled times? Jonah Hoy investigates.
EP: All That Is Solid Melts into Air
Band: SCATTERED ASHES
Released: June 14 2024
It's another normal day; you roam the halls at work, see the same faces with the usual semantics. But the day in and day out of the regularity of life feels almost too much to bear. Somehow you get to where you need to go, do what you need to do, but all you remember is getting in and getting out at lightspeed.
In this mediocre merry go round, the drabness of life's materialism, war, famine and anxiety build angst and fear for the future with a ringing in your ear. Yet also there is this music, the soul vibrating drum fills and melodic crystallised arpeggios, distortion filled punches overlapping its sound. And through the hollow mundanity you find yourself in, carrying all your angst and wretchedness, is a blimp ray of sunshine that makes you tap your foot and bob your head. Ever so slightly, but ever so effortlessly you dance like the goth kids in South Park.
Scattered Ashes' new release is a soulful enterprise that encapsulates the dreadful regularity of life that seems too hard to bear. Their new EP, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, takes the awful unprecedented times we are in, takes all that doom and gloom, and reflects how the human experience makes us feel sick. It takes all things big and little - materialism, drug addiction and the darkest side of human nature - and expands on the apathy and greed of it all.
In all the rough edged rock there's a sweetness in the middle that glows enough for intimacy and compassion to push itself to the surface.
Lyrically focused, the story tells a tale of anger and fighting; literally as the track They Can't Divide Us was recorded in the midst of the Dublin riots. The music was birthed from a hellfire of human torment and resistance, which makes the title, All That Is Solid Melts into Air more convincing as it comes from a Karl Marx quote.
Birthed from defiance and contempt, with lyrics and stories that expand on the dread of humanity, it also manages to be hopeful, not only in the lyrics but in the sound too. In all the rough edged rock, there's a sweetness in the middle that glows enough for intimacy and compassion to push itself to the surface.
In the final track, I Will be King, although the sound is pulled through the distorted punch of its euphony, within there lies an inner softness and sweetness. It has an unbridled hopefulness in its voice that lets you feel the yearning in its melodies. That somehow all of this is worth it, all the dread and despair even when everything feels fake, and you don't know what to believe or hear.
It peeks its head out with its hot blooded optimism. It's sad and wants things to be different and somehow the faith is being kept alive - even if you can't see it, there's a little light that sparks. Despite what everything and everyone tells us about the world, and us as a species.
Picking up the reference from earlier, South Park, crude, vile and inappropriate, shares these traits with punk (and by extension post punk) but also the very conditions that created it (the Karl Marx quote ends " ... and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."). The show has a name as rude and insensitive, making fun of hallowed topics. Yet it is also hopeful; through the anger and crassness of the script and jokes, in the dread they share, there is an aspiration for a better foot forward.
There is an episode where it's raining and Butters comes to the Goths' stoop and talks to them. They are all doom and gloom, saying the world isn't worth saving, telling him there's no room for hope. But Butters just got dumped and reflects on life “Well yeah, I'm sad, but at the same time I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like, it makes me feel alive, you know? It makes me feel human. And the only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt something really good before.”
And so the personal becomes political. Butters and the Goths, in their differing ideals of sadness and optimism, mesh well together and Scattered Ashes' All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a perfect example of the angry depression of human existence and the times we are in. That craving for a better life mixed with angst and anger at the whole world is the first step in fixing the problem; it means we want to fight for something better.
Out on June 14th, the angsty fed up optimism of Scattered Ashes sums up everything that the whole world is feeling at the moment.
The new EP All That Is Solid Melts Into Air available now on 12" black vinyl.
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