Daily Jam - The Black Amnesias

This column was originally published in October, 2017.

So, I had a song picked out for this week’s column, written up and ready to go, and then as seems to have happened on too many occasions to even comprehend this year, tragedy and horror greeted me Monday morning and made my little music and pop culture musings seem all the more trite and unnecessary. It feels like it’s every week now. A natural disaster, another racially motivated death or acquittal, the rich continuing to eat the poor in this country, the laughable state of this petulant administration, misdirected rage, or another mass shooting like we had last night in Las Vegas. This universe just keeps beating my soul down. And so, my prepared column just doesn’t seem like the way to go anymore. Maybe next week.

In the interim, I’ve got something that feels a little more relevant as to my current mood, “The Black Amnesias,” the opening track from UK band Hope of The States’ 2004 album The Lost Riots. The instrumental song to a record mired in death sounds like anguish. It sounds like pain. Like loss. And it should, as the band’s guitarist James Lawrence committed suicide before the record was complete, hanging himself in the studio after his bandmates and the recording engineers had gone home. The band completed the album, and then hobbled on for a couple more years before calling it quits. And while I can’t really attest to the rest of the group’s work, the post rock wail of “The Black Amnesias” moves me every time.

I guess it’s what I need right now.