“So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.” If Padmé
Amidala was a historical soothsayer rather than a fictional senator-cum-queen
(you’d have to research the politics of Naboo, I’m not 100 percent clear on the
succession thing either), we’d all be praising her premonition and lamenting
the present it foresaw, all Sith lords and jackboots. While I kid, a little
bit, Horselover Fats (more on the heaviness of that moniker in a minute) appears to follow Padmé’s lead and extend
it just a bit further – that thunderous applause has become thunderous
drumbeats and guitar shredding, and liberty has been stomped to death, spat
upon, and burned to a crisp, leaving nothing but its ashes – Liberty Ashes, yes – to disperse upon
the wind over the everlasting march of time. And that’s just the A-side, the
title track! You don’t need Jar-Jar Binks to stumble all up in your business,
blabbering incoherently before inadvertently saving your life as the so-called
“surveillance state” swoops in to gather up all the bad apples, no-goodniks,
and countercultural warriors. Any way you look at it, “Aria for the
Surveillance State” is an ode to chaos in a time after the hammer’s been
dropped, a neo-future wasteland like the ones Los Angeles and New York became
in 1980s sci-fi action films. Oh, sure, you can exist in it, but it’s not the
greatest existence you can imagine. Horselover Fats, the name lifted from
Philip K. Dick’s semiautobiographical character in VALIS, oozes paranoia over unseen forces as the musicians conjure
unease in every conceivable capacity, but these days we don’t need to be
drugged out to hallucinate the madness – it’s already in front of us. Liberty Ashes is like a road trip away
from the decaying metropolises and toward some distant unseen rural hope – you
steal car after car to keep the authorities off your tail, you hitchhike when
you have to. Before you know it you’ve been stabbed in the ass by a stranger at
the bus station. Hey, he’s just as freaked out as you – put some Bactine on it
and give him a break.
--Ryan Masteller
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