by Emmanuel Castillo (@thebruiseonwe)
Thirdface’s Ministerial Cafeteria synthesizes various strains of metal-leaning hardcore — Black Flag’s later sludgey, dissonant shredding, a chaotic approach to catchiness and repetition that borrows from Deadguy and Rorschach — and the results eschew the overt signifiers of metal to reinforce a groove based approach to riffing. The whole time, they maintain a sense of propulsion that makes their brand of chaos hang together better as a batch of songs, making their kind of hardcore — ugly and evil as it may sound — extremely danceable. The band will deploy a riff the same, but the ending of a phrase might be subject to endless variation in a track’s short run time.
Kathryn Edwards imagines the ministerial cafeteria as something similar to a prison cafeteria where only your worst self gets to live another day. Thirdface lay it all out there: the loneliness, the indignation, but also the self sabotage when consequences are all you see. It’s like they’re seeing clearly for the first time and it’s overwhelming to the point that they can’t conceive of a different future. The record oscillates between this hopelessness and a sense of defiance. For every lyric that references the former (“Master holds the key” on “Stalkwalk” or the disdain of guilt on “Bankroll”) there are others that eye the power of violence with something resembling both fear and desire, the one-two of “Beneviolent” and “Artifact of Darkness” capturing this reaction best. The former deals with a sense of unreality and considers the worth of behaving when it degrades your sense of self, and the latter responds with a horror movie-esque surrender to the instrument of violence, the prose appropriately shifting to the language of sacrifice and salvation.
“Sour” is the longest track on the record at three minutes, and the band does everything they can to make it an epic. The guitar’s ghostly melody breaks free from the established rhythm to dance around Edwards vocals. At times, their pitch gets close enough that it sounds like they’re dueting, the guitar’s “voice” weaving and shaking through her throaty screams. “Sour” builds out the world of the record, imagining the entirety of lived experience as a prison mess hall where you start and end every day eating garbage that’s supposed to be nourishing (“It ain’t much - it’s the best we’ve got / Appreciate your choice like you ought / Dietary degradation / Over time you will succumb.”)
While they make the themes of the record explicit in “Sour,” a lot of the themes are elaborated through the interplay of vocals and instrumentals rather than what the lyrics are literally saying. “Puretouch” is a lusty song, desire taking root and the body responding, and it’s only when Edwards spits “Heart beat quickening” to a flurry of sixteenth notes from the drums that you notice how much the physical symptoms of desire resemble a panic attack. As she goes to describe her feeling more. (“Hands searching and I’m wanting the feel of a pure touch / body aching, still I’m wanting the taste of a pure touch”) linking her wants to her bodies reactions, the song taps deeper into the unsafe feeling that keeps desire repressed — the song sublimates desire rather than fully acting on it.
The environment depicted by the band complicates perspective, causing this pervasive undercurrent of paranoia where your worst impulses seem to always collide with the worst of what life immediately offers. This hyper awareness of the structures that encourage your worst behaviors and the desires that chafe against these chains comes to a head in the final track, “Purify.” Edwards doesn’t mince words: everything must go. “Bleach/Burn it all away/ Removal of all doubt / Erase.” It doesn’t feel like there’s a way out; you have to start over. New world, new you, new walls to enclose you.
There is (or was) a moment in hardcore that led other hardcore bands to scramble to benefit from the spoils of hookier bands than them. Thirdface completely separates themselves from that kind of trend based songwriting, content to make scary music that looks into the void and relays the terrors. Their songs move along with efficient, even violent arrangements, moments of technicality playing off of grooves both aggressive and danceable. The short run times make these moments especially memorable, hooky moments in the middle of a pummeling. It’s not music with solutions, because there is no one size that fits all, but it’s honest catharsis at a time when bands are content selling a hollow positivity.
Ministerial Cafeteria, for all of its concerns with life’s abjections, is not a hopeless record. It just has its eye on the prize. In seeing your worst self as something you bring around with you, there is something to imagining finally seeing outside of the prison, seeing the abjection as anything other than a permanent condition. “Sour” again: “Refuse to eat the bullshit this time / flames licking at the walls of yore /no more nobles no more fucking brass.” The record is about noticing cycles before you’re stuck repeating them forever. There must be something better than this, if not necessarily something good. The music is about the moment of realization, not about wallowing. When you realize, the pattern changes, complicates things, and forces you to adapt. Thirdface adapts with an eye towards survival because they recognize the difference between need and comfort, but more to the point: it can be better to cut your losses and start again.