Grief is a son of a bitch, and everybody knows what it’s like to rail against it. Be it with fury, self-flagellation, or the famed “denial stage.” I can name at least ten rock and roll bands that sell records by fueling those emotions for people. God bless ‘em, honestly, I’m a rage junkie myself, and their music gives me a spiritual outlet! And protects the neighborhood from me!
But, on the soft underbelly, embracing grief as it comes takes someone truly brave: forgiving, letting live, and all the rest. For the most part, I can only name one band, and one album, that commits to this message entirely, from pen to studio: some images of paradise and their debut LP, i expect the same of you.
Hailing from the “sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous” Limerick, Ireland, some images of paradise create sludge-folklore—serving the awesome mythology of love, grace, and mercy on a platter of fuck-off screamo sound tropes. i expect the same of u eases the low lows of growing pains with the terrifying and wonderful notion of “living as a process of learning.”
Let me be clear, I have nothing against unadulterated rage and despair as a valid, even sacred, part of life. And in their album, neither do some images of paradise. Actually, “reach heaven by violence” is the standout song: something of a dark waltz. Autumn, the lead singer, writes to me: “I [reflect] on my previous addiction to self-harm and being in a very spiritually confused place, whereby I felt that if there was a God, that He may not be truly equipped to punish me (as He operates and experiences things on an incomprehensible level) however if the opposite was true and there was no God, I felt that there would be no-one/nothing to punish me.” So with this in mind, upon re-listen, I could decode Autumn’s screaming pleas for punishment, which otherwise felt buried in the texture. The track explores the darkest possible thoughts a person can have and places them, prosodically, on a bright altar, building skyward. As if to lift sorrow to the ear of God.
Spectrally, the album carousels from digital to analog to acoustic in an awesome and seamless narrative arc, best heard in “kwaidan.” “There’s sort of an immense freedom in not respecting the ideals of the genre we’re supposedly part of on one song or another,” says the band’s drummer, Evan, over email. “An approach I strongly believe in is working on the music as if it were a clay sculpture: carefully adding details and shaping them until they sit right—trusting that those moment-by-moment ideas and decisions become the DNA of the overall work.” You can clock this method within their arrangements pretty well, especially hearing the shattering transition from electronic wasteland “when i’m gone to dark,” to the desperate “u make me miserable.” The DNA, as Evan puts it, is the fluctuation of moods between paralytic madness and then getting up and going nuts in a totally different direction. An ever-morphing sculpture, indeed.
i expect the same of you was recorded using an entirely DIY setup. “We do most of everything in Evan/Kevin’s living room. It’s just one gigantic desk with a monitor, 2 speakers, Evan’s laptop, and a few keyboards/guitars lying nearby. It’s really bedroomy!” Autumn explains. Even the production and mixing are done entirely in-house by the band. The result—per the “clay sculpture” approach—is a wholly unified energy that could certainly be achieved in a studio, but demands that extra touch of problem-solving teamwork, which can be known to make or break bands.
For some images of paradise, the DIY process combined with the message of forgiveness and healing underlines the promise and miracle of mutual respect and love. Exposed, ashen, and immense, i expect the same of you is a testament to the power of rock music to challenge listeners to embrace the hard questions of life, the way religion would: what do we make with our lives, how much more do we listen rather than speak, is punishment possibly worth more than forgiveness, and what is the most amount of love we can put out there.
