Going Dark

Paint It Black reaches new heights with its bleakest album yet.

by John Vettese

John Vettese DOCTOR MEET OKTOPUS: Dr. Dan Yemin (above) enlisted Dälek's Oktopus to turn New Lexicon into something weird. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Andy Nelson remembers what friends and label reps said when they first heard Paint It Black's new album: "Scary." "Dark." "Major bummer."

Now, it's no surprise that Philadelphia's premier hardcore band — which has, in the past, covered divorce, alcoholism and mortality with a devastating grimness — has failed to make the feel-good hit of the season.

But New Lexicon, which drops Tuesday on Wilmington's Jade Tree Records, really does feel heavier than before. Frontman Dan Yemin's lyrics read like he's hit rock bottom. The man who once dissected the institutional abuse of power now seems to be shrieking from a place of powerlessness. Several songs stitched together by sound collages, metallic pitter-patters and burning white noise.

"One particular person told us he was driving through the woods by himself and listening to it," Nelson recalls over tea at Mugshots near Yemin's Fairmount home. "He said, 'I felt so scared, like I wanted to crawl into a hole.'"

Yemin's grin widens. "I like that. If somebody has a visceral reaction to it, whatever it is, that's great."

New Lexicon began in Baltimore last summer. Engineer J. Robbins spent a week in his studio with the latest incarnation of Paint It Black (out: guitarist Colin McGinnis, drummer Dave Wagenschutz; in: Josh Agran and Jared Shavelson) and "what we were left with ... sounded like a bare-bones hardcore record, nothing weird," says Nelson.

But "weird" was in the plan all along. Yemin enlisted Oktopus, the production half of avant hip-hop duo Dälek.

"I've been listening to them since the beginning," Yemin says. "And their records, to borrow Andy's phrase, sound like hip-hop happening inside the head of an insane person with the subwoofers cranked up." He wanted to see if Paint It Black's songs could be infused with the same mood.

Oktopus (real name: Alap Momin) was given minimal instructions beyond rock-geek reference points: Silver Apples, Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, Whitehouse. On his own, the producer took the finished source tracks, chopped them to bits and reassembled them in an abstract pastiche with heavy modulation and distortion. Then the band met up in his Union City, N.J., studio to go over the results. They liked what they heard: mosh drumbeat sliced up and turned into a dub rhythm, 10 seconds of a guitar line looped and transplanted, humming backdrops to thrashing songs and evocative transitions that link early tracks to later ones.

See "Missionary Position," the only transition to incorporate field recordings. Yemin won't say what the recordings are, but the song is one of many in New Lexicon to attack institutionalized religion — here, as it relates to war. Yemin screams, "You won't notice the unmarked graves, for the victims of the crusades/ Cathedrals built on the backs of slaves." As the beat thumps into the distance, a punishing noise erupts, blares and disappears. Beneath the piercing processing, it sounds like church bells.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

Or the song title: "Gravity Wins."

Or the rejection of God by the depraved character in "Past Tense, Future Perfect," whose final stand is upright and resolute: "We may bend, but we will not be broken."

Throughout, the album acknowledges the simple contradictions of human nature. In a way, it embraces them.

"There's certain elements of helplessness and powerlessness that you have to own, and incorporate into being human," Yemin says. "There's all these things that can happen to you, but you have no control over them."

Yemin knows this as well as anyone — his landmark band, Kid Dynamite, broke up abruptly. He suffered a stroke in his mid-30s. He still deals with health issues. But he's still here.

"You have to take that all in and figure out who you're going to be, given those things."

Dark? Hardly.

(j_vettese@citypaper.net)