Balaclavas
Some credit Sherman’s march through the South as the earliest example of Industrial Total War. Down to burn Atlanta, East to raze Savannah, and North to squeeze Lee like paste from the tube towards Grant. Deny supplies; end production; hasten ends; all in the context of a war fought as much for competing economic models as it ever was for notions of equality or human rights.
We prefer The Crimean War, however. From beneath the pudding-skin guise of defending the Holy Lands, a completely pre-Industrial pretext for conflict, Rail, Telegraph and Nursing are taken from quiet halls of theory to dirty hills of hell. Trenches are first dug for men to kill from and die in; artillery is fired to where the eyes cannot sea; musket balls are given points and barrels are rifled. Scientific enhancement of the tools of violence trips and tumbles down an ever steeper gravel path and not for a century will the restraint not to use it catch up and clutch the collar of the white coat right before the precipice.
In music, in literature, in film, and in military theory, one action in particular from this war between Imperial Russia and the armies of France, England and the United Kingdom comes down to us through the subsequent volumes of conflict, fog, spoils and victory – The Charge of the Light Brigade. Dragoons, Lancers and Hussars all, under the charge of the Lord Cardigan, hasten into a valley to deny retreating Russians of their heavy guns and during the mile gallop many hasten the denial of their own lives. Alfred, Lord Tennyson immortalizes them in prose; Iron Maiden, Megadeath, New Model Army, Pearls Before Swine and other immortalize them in song; students of the Fog of War immortalize them in countless essays. The survivors limp back, far from the Holy Land and close only to the quick consequences of Industrial war, to their camp in a Crimean valley, a valley named Balaclava.
It took us weeks to find the right words for this record, Balaclavas’ self-titled EP. In part, we are desperately late-pass in sharing our thoughts on this record because we did not understand it so easily as we should have. We understood why, like defending the Holy Land, it appealed to us. Crisply plucked guitar strings that cannot gallop fast enough to escape their own reverb and delay; drums that urge us forward though their escorting fife is absent; bass-lines that hold it all together but shouldn’t. Tracks and vocals that occasionally command us to dance, but tones and moods that cry mutiny. Yet we could not draw sense from it anymore than we could digging heels deep ever deeper into a steed’s side to speed ascension to the Holy Land above in defense of the Holy Land below.
This record made us nervous; it gave us discomforting stomach aches and questioned our ability to comprehend - it tempted us to use the words ‘avant garde’. In the end, we may be no closer than before to cracking its defenses. But its strangeness is no longer strange – it is now accustomed beauty, though we don’t know why or how that happened. It is crying out to us, and we hear its words clear as a telegraph, though their message remains in the incensed mystery of occultation. This is a record for the heat of the advance and the rain of the retreat both. For when you have a cold and when you are nursed back.
But in the local context, this is a record for this season – for this holy time to have a stack of Houston records in your heavy play bin. The year’s regiment of aces releases continues to muster towards industry and broader commerce on the horizon. Balaclavas is unique in Houston and uniquely Houston. They are a sign of these powerful times as any. Recommended.
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