It’s time to look back on an album that had a major impact on my life and that I have been returning to again and again over the years. The hosts of Vibe Check, Saeed Jones, Sam Sanders, and Zach Stafford, discuss this idea in terms of “modern scriptures;” those texts that you find yourself revisiting during times of difficulty. In a recent recording, Sam Sanders defined a modern scripture as “a text that you can always come back to when you need it. And sometimes it will mean different things based on the day, based on where you are when you receive it, and based on who says it to you. And these words can be this infinite font of wisdom because the words are the same, but the meaning can change for you.” I’ve been streaming this TRIAL album off and on since the 2024 U.S. election and I figured this was good enough a week to discuss it more fully.
I want to say up front that this is not my favorite album or anything like that. I have been into it on and off since high school and seeing the band on their tour supporting it is a strong, positive memory. It’s not an album I think about when I think about my favorites nor did it completely overtake my listening when I first heard it. The impact it had was felt and known only in retrospect. There are some albums whose release I awaited with years or months or weeks of anticipation. I don’t remember where or when I bought the CD version of “Are These Our Lives?” but it could have been at the short-lived Raw Records in Evanston. I probably sold it when I was in college or shortly after, when I was culling what I would now call cringey records from my adolescence. Ones that did not stand the test of time but seemed so important at that time, yet still did not have any kind of nostalgic appeal. That stance was short lived, as I downloaded it not too many years after, the digital format doing the release no justice.
The booklet itself is the key part. Anyone who knows my music listening habits knows that I make a ritual of inspecting the liner notes and other extratextual information of any record, CD, cassette, whatever, before I dive into my first listen. On this album, each song has its own page in the booklet and each song also has an excerpt from an associated text above its lyrics. This was the first time I’d read or even heard about Howard Zinn, Emma Goldman, and Mikhail Bakunin. I mean some of my friends in the Honors class of American Interdisciplinary Studies were reading Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, so I knew of Zinn, but this was from a HC punk band, not a high school teacher. It was different. I was merely in the Advanced section of the same class (so not as rigorous) and we didn’t use that text. So, it seemed like this band had something to teach me. I think that’s still true.
There were a few interviews with vocalist Greg Bennick in the zines I picked up over the next little while and the erudition (no, I wouldn’t have used that word then) reflected in the lyrics was supported by his responses to the zine editors’ questions. I still think about the pull quote the editor of either Value of Strength or Reflections used for the interview with Greg in an issue. It’s about how the band is his “immortality project” and how he is jealous of the wall that forms the room they are speaking in because it will be there for hundreds of years after they both die.
For me, the music holds up as well as any brick wall. It’s some of the most melodramatic, passionate, and intense HC punk that I like. You could have heard records or bands like this one described disparagingly as amazingcore by members of certain online communities around 2003 or so. At that time, if a person in a band that I liked criticized another band or genre in that manner, I listened and followed their words like gospel. (Like I mentioned above, I ended up selling the CD around this time.) I was being socialized into feeling ashamed about something I liked because it wasn’t cool anymore. I’m glad I’m not like that now. This rips, still. I don’t give a shit about guilty pleasures or whatever. If I like it, I like it; if you like it, you like it. No guilt necessary. It helped me feel like it was a little bit “cooler” of a record when I saw a label blurb that mentioned the sounds of bands such as BURN, BEYOND, and CRO-MAGS when it was reissued in 2009 or so. That lineage is a bit more fitting sonically and those bands have their place in the canon. But, as a 16-year-old when the record came out, I wouldn’t have known what those bands sounded like. I knew members of CRO-MAGS were to be feared, but that’s about it. It’s funny how the canon evolves over time, not to mention your personal taste.
My lasting memory of the show I saw them play on the tour supporting the album is that people were moshing to the beginning of “Reflections,” the song after the orchestral instrumental intro. The very first thing that tells you this is a record with punk lineage is the rapid hi-hat flourish for the first maybe ten seconds of the song. People cleared space on the tile floor of the Odum and began windmilling and spin-kicking immediately, even before the pummeling double-bass part kicked in. It was like a bomb went off.
Even if the music doesn’t click for you, the ideas still hold up. They sing about the United States as a declining empire and the need to make sense of the world around us by forging connections and community as the world crumbles and falls. One sticking point I have is the inclusion of sample of a Hitler speech, complete with sieg heils, on “Legacy.” If someone overhears you listening to that part of the song, they are going to get the wrong idea. TRIAL, of course, are not Nazis, and include the sample to criticize tepid responses to fascism. How else are we meant to interpret this line? “From 1944 through 1998 / children dead at Birkenau or Tibetans laid to waste / excuses become our legacy.” As you might be able to infer, the answer to the question posed by the album’s title is a deeply bellowed “No!” We do not have to settle for the conditions the world has given us; our lives are worth more than that. Greg reminds us earlier on the title track how “organization can enhance empowerment.” It’s a good idea to keep in mind as the U.S. attorney general is equating suburbanites holding homemade signs outside a failing car company with domestic terrorism. In a moment like this one, it’s good to turn to the tried and true texts from your life. Not for simple comfort, but for the strength to keep on moving, whether alone or in concert with others.
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