by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Between Gumm, Praise, and now Truth Cult, there’s been a refreshing retooling of the mid to late 80s DC sound in hardcore the last few months. Truth Cult leans into the more emocore side of things on their second album, Walk The Wheel, managing to take all the things that were distinct about their debut — impassioned performances, intelligent arrangements within a commitment to a larger aesthetic vision, great fucking songs — and polish those qualities to great effect. The album was recorded live by J. Robbins, which turns out to be the perfect vehicle for the band to show off the chops they’ve earned since supporting Off Fire. Some of the signifiers of hardcore, like mosh parts and breakneck speed, are replaced with things like more traditional guitar solos and a wider range of tempos drawn upon on most of the record. The riffs are more thoughtful and melodic, with Ian Marshall leaning into guitar work that, to my ears, sounded like jangly, old school college rock on some of the prettier moments, but after seeing their record release show cover of “There She Goes,” by the La’s and the Oasis shirt he was wearing there, that also made a lot of sense; immediacy remains the main objective of Truth Cult.
The lyrics, while not exactly straight forward, are still clear in the emotions they’re meant to evoke. Each of the songs are concerned with moments of clarity during turbulent experiences, how to live in those moments when it doesn’t align with where your life is, and seeking those moments again only to find nothing. This comes up first and most poignantly in “Resurrection,” a track eulogizing a dead friend while recognizing the intimacy of loss and being the only one left in the friendship to navigate the aftermath (“Sometimes loss and connection/ Can feel like a resurrection/ Use me for your protection/ Because I'm all that’s left”). It’s a heavy sentiment snuck in through a trojan horse of a song: major keys and slashed power chords collide with bouncy bass and sunny backing vocals before the song reaches its climax with a rippin’ stop-start guitar solo.
“Heavy Water,” one of the catchiest songs on the record, could be a song about vices and pleading for their quasi-healing properties, but the imagery just as quickly evokes bleeding to death. Vocalist Paris Roberts shouts “sucking saccharine til your lips turn blue,” and lets it hang there, an observation torn between the tinge of distress in his voice and the distance in Emily Ferrara’s when she delivers the hook. It’s a stand out on the record and a sign of Truth Cult’s growth — the songwriting itself is strong, but it’s the arrangement that pushes it over the top. Starting the song with bass player and co-vocalist Ferrara’s disembodied voice panning from one side of your speakers to the other as she fades in and out, emphasizes the emptiness around her voice by forcing you to notice where her voice isn’t anymore. When the song does snap into focus with a serrated but catchy riff somewhere between Dag Nasty and Ink + Dagger, Paris Roberts’ swaggering vocals, the crash of cymbals, and the filled in space is abrupt enough to feel like you ran through a wall — the implication of blunt force trauma and blood made manifest.
Blood as an image runs thick through “Heavy Water” despite the specifics of violence left unsaid; it recurs throughout the record, the implication that craving the type of catharsis needed to be free of life's weight is part of the inevitability of violence when there's no release valve. Nowhere is this more obvious than "Naked in the End," the track which features the prettiest guitar work on the album. Glittering arpeggios open the song, giving way to pounding drums and Ferrara’s soft and affecting vocals, culminating in an anthemic chorus. The song is so fun that you might not notice Ferrara singing about feeling confined or Roberts explicitly invoking cut veins, but once it clicks, the song’s buoyancy becomes a life affirming gesture.
The closer, “Medicine,” finds Truth Cult adopting the cyclical grooves of Baltimore punk predecessors Lungfish. Paris Roberts rages in the foreground, his vocals doubled by background chants that borrow the ghostly quality of Ferrara's hook on "Heavy Water," but with a droney, meditative quality. It belies the lyrical content of the song, possibly the most scathing on the record because Truth Cult is the one cutting up this time, with Roberts targeting the emptiness of the art that often rises to the top: “Why are we destined to listen/To motherfuckers with all the weapons?/Feeble minded pain/Is that what we asked for?” The brevity of the song stands in large contrast to how massive each bar becomes as the riff builds and repeats — here, the catharsis comes from watching them cruise towards a cliff, but the song ends right before we see them drive off of it, an exhilarating way to end the record.
Truth Cult’s greatest assets are their intensity, restraint, and chemistry — musical tension to make you grind your teeth, only for the energy to explode when appropriate, but neither is done through expected means. The specifics of each member’s playing turns the band into something different than their emocore predecessors or contemporaries, a bit more thoughtful without becoming self conscious or derivative. Robin Zeijlon keeping a bouncy beat, emphasizing them with well timed fills rather than filling every bar with a barrage of eighth notes to give the impression of intensity with no purpose. This has to do with how often Ferrara’s bass lines drive the song and their relative economy compared to the guitar and drum parts. Truth Cult are deliberate in synthesizing each member’s contributions, making it essential to contextualize this as a snapshot of where the band is presently. There's enough pushing against their own boundaries that show they're a band interested in balancing their expression with challenging themselves, and the growth they’ve made in only a handful of years between two vibrant and vital LPs suggests their best records are still ahead of them.