One of the best shows I ever went to was at a bar called “The Blarney Stone”, which has a checkered reputation, and involved no amplification whatsoever. This was in late summer/early fall of 2015. Edgar and I went to hear a band called Blackbird Raum (n.b.: this link is Spotify; subsequent band listings will be youtube or bandcamp) play, and we were one of approximately four people who had come to see them – sadly, offhand comments from the succeeding band, to their fans, made it doubtful that the band we had come to see would ever return to Kansas City. A tragic outcome, honestly: I want to share their music with more people.

We left before we could hear the band that played after. I honestly don’t even remember what they were called.

I realize that this commentary may make any further aesthetic comments I make seem less authoritative for some people, but I have a soft spot for folk-punk. I’ve already spoken to my punk bona fides, but adding “folk” to it often brings to mind crusties for people – the hybrid-form of punk and hippie that is stereotyped as traveling by boxcar and sanctimoniously looking down on those who dwell in houses or brush their teeth regularly.

Miss me with that. I shower regularly, and sometimes I listen to folk punk when I’m in the shower.

For those who are unfamiliar, the basic idea of folk-punk is best summarized as a fusion of Celtic and English folk music and punk rock, usually with acoustic instrumentation – acoustic guitar, yes, but many also implement mandolin, violin, accordion, and washboard. These are musicians as comfortable with Byker Hill as with Minor Threat et al.

The two big names, I’m informed are Against Me! and the Pogues, though I have to admit that I mentally categorize them separately from the genre that they are emblematic of: the former just seems to me to be straight punk, while the latter is in the (admittedly quite closely-aligned) realm of Celtic Punk. When I think of folk-punk, though, I tend to think of a fairly large tent. Approaches range from the depressive realism of Ramshackle Glory and Pat the Bunny, to the lysergic absurdism of AJJ (formerly, but no longer, Andrew Jackson Jihad,) to the syndycalist exhortations of Immaculate Misconception, the deranged cowboy band of the Haymarket Squares, and the backwoods anarchism of Mischief Brew. But for me, the darkness and hunger exemplified by Blackbird Raum is going to always provide a lens through which I understand the whole genre.

Blackbird Raum’s Swidden. — Blackbird Raum’s *Swidden*.

The band has released – at this point – four albums: 2008’s Swidden, 2009’s Under the Starling Host, 2013’s False Weavers, and 2015’s Destroying. There is a palpable increase in skill from one album to the next, with the first two being a solid first and sophomore effort. Of course, an increase in skill is not the only thing that can make a work of art better – if the concept behind the earlier, less skillful effort is better, it is possible that there are things to be derived from it that are more valuable.

(Edgar informs me that I am wrong, and that I do not give False Weavers its due. I admit that this is a possibility, but I will be continuing with my assessment.)

There are certain tracks off of Under the Starling Host and Swidden that I esteem to be more valuable listening than some of the tracks off of False Weavers and Destroying. I’m going to love “The Helm of Ned Kelly” until the day I die, because I would never have thought to equate the legend of Taliesin with the history of an Australian bushranger, and I’m still not 100% certain on the nature of the correspondence, but I still feel in my bones that the correspondence is there and that it has a value to it.

For those unaware of who Ned Kelly is, the first thing you need to know is that he fought the Australian police wearing homemade armor, the second is that he had fantastic hair.

Moreover, we can’t deny within this limited milieu the influence of “Witches” or “Honey in the Hair” as a track – at least one person has called the latter “the ‘Wonderwall’ of folk punk,” hinting that it is perhaps overplayed as an early attempt at playing the genre.

There’s a bit of a primitivist bent to them – they, much like the rest of us, are aware of and terrified of the specter of climate change – and it informs not just the content but the style of their music. They play without amplification, they cry out their songs at the top of their lungs and fill the space in which they play.

I am not a primitivist – in many ways, I think of myself as something of the opposite of a primitivist – but there’s a bit of the effect that many evangelists talk about, of the rhetorical equivalent of putting a rock in one’s shoe: it may not change your mind but it will make you think.

This is all shading into hagiography, and I’ll have none of that. Instead of praise, what lessons can we draw from this band? From this form of art?

I think that last point is a good place to work from: regardless of your ideological orientation, if you have a belief, it should be felt not just within the content of your work (in truth, I think that consciously placing it in the content is the mark of an amateur, or possibly an incredibly naive soul, personally), but in the form of your work. A strongly held belief should make itself visible at the level of paradigm, not syntax. It will, obviously, inform other things at that level, but it ceases to be didactic at that point, becoming instead an organizing principle.

When looking at it closely, I can see a certain correspondence with Over the Garden Wall: they engage productively with the forms of the past, but do not edge into nostalgia. The reason for this is that they are not engaging with it in a way that the nostalgic pictures of the past we have been presented with prepare us to recognize, because they have been scrubbed away.

The opening track (okay, Edgar, I have to give you this one) of False Weavers begins with a fairly 80s style synth, but it is disrupted and drowned out underneath a driving acoustic guitar, as if the kid’s pool of late-20th-century nostalgia is swamped beneath a wave of deep time and dragged out to sea. This is one of the few intrusions of contemporary electronica into the corpus of their music, which is often not just played without electricity, but (if their copy is to be believed) more often than not recorded without electricity, using entirely analog equipment.

The Death of Wat Tyler, rendered by an unknown artist. If you don’t know about the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, I would recommend looking it up.

And this commitment to a non-contemporaneity shines through in their music. One could imagine that they are musicians that played for Wat Tyler and John Ball, stolen by the fair folk and spat out again in the modern day to ride trains, play mandolin, and lament being stuck in the desert.

But by committing to this timeless image, this uncanny specter of what “musicians” have been for the past two thousand years and trying their damnedest to embody that for the early 21st century, they achieve something more than just the status of “a folk punk band” – they become the subaltern musician playing the streets of every city from Rome to London to Vienna to Santa Cruz, apparently.

Another important lesson that I think creatives can draw from this band is their insistence on drawing less-than-obvious points of comparison. How is Taliesin like Ned Kelly? And vice-versa? How is burning a witch like hunting a wolf from a helicopter? And vice-versa? What can be learned from a bird perched in cellphone tower? These images are charged, certainly, but what are the purpose of these juxtapositions? There is a fine art to this sort of borderline asemic metaphor: you can’t simply place two objects next to each other in a way that leads to a nonsensical cognitive dissonance: that’s just dada. No, the art is in selecting two things or actions and placing them next to each other, resulting in a push-and-pull effect that makes the images so much more powerful. This sort of comparison (“asemic metaphor” is a weak and overly-theoretical term for it, but I’m too much of a theory-head to know what else to call it, honestly) creates a feedback loop of meaning, occupying the conscious mind and allowing the music, which already enters the mind on the level of emotion, to have a stronger effect than it would otherwise.

It’s possible that transposing this technique into the visual or literary arts could have a weaker form of the same effect: it’s an idea that I’ll have to explore.

Finally, I’ve got to reexamine what I said about the Uncanny and the Unheimlich, i.e., that one is a lying thing and the other is a lying context (thus, a context where truth appears to be but cannot be found.) Because, on reflection, Blackbird Raum appears to be both honest about what they are saying and presenting an uncanny riff upon Anglo-American culture.

So let’s create a new category: the Metachronic, to refer to things that plunge, wholeheartedly, into an uncanny/unheimlich mode as an escape from capture by nostalgia. When we say “Metachronic” we are not simply attaching “meta” to “chronic” in the sense of traumatically suffering over time, but as a collapsing of the term “Chronicle” or “chronology” – a work of metachrony is something that uses a temporal flattening of the syntax to serve a particular purpose of the syntax. To reference True Detective, it is the artistic expression of the idea that “time is a flat circle.”

To reference back to the piece I wrote on the subject of trauma, it uses the mnemonic and re-experiential mechanisms of trauma to a particular and not-necessarily-traumatic end. In short, it is anachronism used in a way that resists the infantilizing effects of nostalgia, but does not plunge wholly into the discomfort of the unheimlich.

Now that I have articulated what the category is, I’m going to drop it: a differentiation and examination of Metachrony as it relates to Nostalgia and the Uncanny is a big topic and one that deserves its own piece. Keep your eyes peeled for a piece on that.

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With a Plumed Helmet and a Broken Sword: Blackbird Raum and Metachrony