64 minutes, 23 seconds

Death in June
The Corn Years

This was the first Death in June album I ever bought. I can't remember the name of the store, but it was a decrepit-looking place somewhere in the East Village, sometime around 1990 or 1991. Something about the cover grabbed my attention. Maybe it was the camouflage print (I trooped around in an old drab olive army jacket at the time) or maybe it was just the name of the group.

Not knowing anything about DIJ, I was half-expecting this to be an industrial album. And, well, it is, in some sense, but it's mostly folk, and that threw me a bit. I didn't like folk, but I didn't know about this kind of folk--an intense, aggressive, and strange music that inverted the traditional Arlo Guthrie/Bob Dylan image of the genre. It was subversive, if only because it didn't seem to espouse the same hippie ideals as other kinds of folk music. It was using the hippies' chief weapon ("This machine kills fascists," as Woody Guthrie famously scratched into his acoustic guitar) against them.

And while that's an interesting idea, it's also somewhat troubling, because the opposite of hippie, if that's what Doug Pearce and friends are aiming for, is not especially palatable to people with more or less liberal political sensibilities.

I wrote about issues related to alleged crypto-fascism in neofolk and industrial music in previous posts, and what I wrote about Allerseelen and other artists could certainly apply here. Suffice it to say that Pearce is a groundbreaking and very talented artist who has actually been forced by German authorities to explain his music and deny any fascist or Nazi agenda in his lyrics. That doesn't make him guilty of anything; rather, it points up how difficult it is for many people--myself included--to understand what he's truly getting at in his art.

That said, The Corn Years, a compilation of material released originally on the Brown Book and World That Summer LPs, is one of my favorite recordings, despite its poor sound quality. I'd be tempted to buy the original recordings (since reissued on CD) if they contained the extra tracks this CD and its companion, The Cathedral of Tears, feature. But alas, they don't. So I won't.

I'll just turn up the volume on The Corn Years, drink a German wine, and drift to dreams of better lives and greater times.

Also today:

64:22 Zentriert ins Antlitz, Prozium
64:21 Mordacious, This Emptiness
64:17 Misericordia, English Mediæval Song
64:16 God Module, Artificial (CD 1 of 2)
64:16 The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath a Cloud, The Smell of Blood but Victory
64:15 Fin de Siècle, Patagonie
64:12 Der Blaue Reiter, Le Paradise Funèbre, l'Envers du Tristesse
64:11 Black Lung, The Psychocivilised Society
64:10 This Morn' Omina, Le Serpent Blanc