Embracing Damnation
A guest! This is the first in a sporadic but long-term series of posts we’ll be sourcing from friends, family and otherwise. To usher things in, we give you, Matt Joyce.
I came to The Nation Blue late. Damnation, their second record, was purchased on a whim soon after its release last year, and I don’t know if I was tired or disinterested that late October day, but initially I just didn’t GET IT. There was too much to take in, and it lacked the post-hardcore sugar-rush that I had grown accustomed to.
This seems strange in retrospect. The title track and particularly the buoyant “Idiot” are as accessible and hooky as anything from the Victory/Vagrant conveyor belt – albeit minus the emo clichés. Essentially this is still jump around your bedroom stuff though. Indeed, Damnation was correctly voted Mondo Bizarro’s 2004 album of the year.
- The Nation Blue
- Damnation
- from Damnation
- No longer available
So why are “contemporaries” who share an angst-noise aesthetic like The Used and Behind Crimson Eyes playing at Rod Laver Arena, while The Nation Blue still flails around to ten people at the Espy front-bar? (The band also recently returned from Japan and is currently writing new material). Clearly, while recognition from RRR is one thing, getting in with the kids is another…
We’re being duped, fellow Melbs-ites. Commercial emo is nothing but pop music dressed up in hardcore aesthetics – a ‘product’ that (with a few daring exceptions) is contrived and utterly disposable. Conversely, The Nation Blue are as real as you’ll get – and that’s their distinction. Granted, three bogans from Tasmania (now residing in Melbs) in Low shirts, spinning guitars around their waists and baiting the audience with feedback and noise may not be commercially appealing or instantaneously gratifying, but it is ultimately far more interesting and genuine. In this regard The Nation Blue are as punk rock as you’ll get, though that’s only one element to what they’ve got going on. Labelling them ‘screamo’ or ‘post-hardcore’ is lazy and misleading.
The band’s appeal crystallized for me at this year’s Big Day Out, of all places. It was 11am in the shed, and there might have been fifty people there. Four teenage girls with long stripy socks and butterfly wings stood in front of me, initially jumping and bobbing instinctively to the Helmet-esque beats… It smelled like teen spirit (couldn’t help myself). But it was also jagged, intense. The amplified squall was almost unbearable as guitarist/sometimes singer Tom Lyngcoln gyrated in violent unison with his battered Strat. He was fucking possessed and honestly didn’t give a shit if anyone was watching or not. And no one particularly was.
11.10am. The girls left. I ran to the front and put my arms around the small number of die-hards in the pit, put my fists in the air and surrendered myself. I had finally GOT IT.
Matt Joyce has deferred growing up now for 23 years. He loves cats and Star Wars, and dislikes wanky bios on blogs where people are oh-so-self-deprecating about themselves - yet lacks the originality or talent to depart from this formula. He pretends to know about punk rock, but is in reality a middle-class sellout with no cred whatsoever.