Christianity Versus Drone

Being raised in a Christian household, I didn't get the chance to grasp onto the more fringe sounds of the secular world until my later years of high school. As anyone who grew up in church knows, the world of Christian music is almost comparable to how Earth 2 operates in the DC Universe. Just as there was Barry Allen operating as The Flash on Earth 2, there was Jay Garrick operating under the same moniker on Earth 1. In the secular world, there was My Bloody Valentine, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Black Tambourine, the entire Slumberland stable, etc - in the Christian world, there was Starflyer 59, Joe Christmas, Morella's Forest and the sleepier portion of the Tooth and Nail stable (pre-98 anyway, after that it was all downhill with pop punk cash ins and metalcore mindlessness).

I have an undisclosed amount of cash for anyone who can procure a vinyl copy of this for me.

See here's the thing, when you're a church kid - a youth grouper - it's not all that hard to be a taste maker. Most of your peers are stuck on whatever super group (DC Talk is the most often cited example) making the rounds. In between the Russian-esque iron grip of parental restriction and what can be heard floating in on the waves of the local Christian music station, most of their tastes are formed around whatever they see before their eyes (and whatever their parents place into their ears via the direct line of influence in between leaving the drive way of their house to pulling into the church parking lot). I don't want to go too far by saying those tastes are dull, but let's face it - when you're digging into the more obscure elements of a scene where the bands you like are citing Pavement or The Smiths as their influences, it won't be hard to form such a harsh opinion when everyone around you is waxing poetic about the latest Point of Grace or Carmen paycheck, erm...album.

After you've heard whatever it is your local Christian retailer sheepishly stocks out of obligation to their distributers while raising an eye when someone adventurous comes in and actually BUYS the stuff, you aren't so loathe to agree with someone who finds Audio A's cover of 'Free Ride' to be the end all of RAWK. (For all of its dated cliches, the machine gun industrial metal of the likes of Klank - despite being stocked on the shelves of cozy and safe Christian bookstores - actually scared the pants off of many parents at the time. Imagine that, parents restricting their children from buying products within their safe, insular domains of God-dom. With its cover art looking very much like the poster for a Hellraiser film, one wonders if those who stocked the shelves were even paying attention. Talk about subversion!)

The benchmark for a safe listening experience. Even now after seven years of being disbanded, parents are attempting to pass Audio Adrenaline off as the cutting edge of rock and roll to the children they've so vigilantly sheltered.

I'd heard swaths of Starflyer 59 here and there by the time I hit my senior year in high school. Seeing 'No New Kind of Story' in video form on a Tooth and Nail DVD (not realizing until much later just how close the video was paying homage visually to a posthumous Joy Division tribute where JD themselves were paying tribute to their recently fallen frontman Ian Curtis) gave me a hint of the dreamy atmospheres Jason Martin had begun to craft. Hearing various b-sides on compilations from the Silver, Gold and Americana eras gave me a more fleshed out idea of what Jason Martin was doing prior to his infatuation with shimmering, Smithsian melodies.

The stark minimalism surely led many a Christian retailer to some understandable head scratching.

By the time I purchased a used copy of Gold on my 18th birthday, I was already familiar with the sounds I would find on the record. Already manically obsessed with Morella's Forest (see first entry) and their mashing up of saccharine sweet melodies and wall of sound guitars, I wasn't disappointed with the record by any means. Having seen the record's lead off track 'House Wife Love Song' on that aformentioned DVD, I already knew what I was getting into and as I dug further and further into the snail's pace drones of each song, could almost feel the music video's rats crawling all over me. Those ended up being shivers of astonishment at what I had just discovered.

Gold was something of a game changer in terms of how I viewed music. Certainly it provided the bread crumbs I needed to get further out of the walled garden (much like a malcontent jail breaks their iPhone) of the Christian music realm and further into the wide world of the dreaded secular. Seeing a year end Best Of list by Martin in 2001 where he listed New Order's 'Get Ready' as the best album of the year (up to this point, New Order were one of my few secular pleasures - their Substance 1987 album had become a favorite one year prior) went a little further in completely snapping the chains as well.

When you're raised in a Christian environment, there's a good chance that a large majority of what you enjoy will be at some point or another labeled as sinful. Secular music then as now will always be at the top of the list. Seeing a 'Christian' artist - someone sanctioned by the guilds of the Christian bookstores and the tribunals of the Church - actually acknowledging that they listened to secular music was extremely liberating and certainly helped the existential crisis I felt having come of age under the heavy shadow of a Bible (a few years back when I was doing freelance work for a magazine called HM, the editor e-mailed me asking me to revise my year end Best Of list due to the high quantity of secular records listed and the almost non-existance of any Christian ones).

Listening to Gold in 2011, I can see the 18 year old version of me in 2002 coming to the end of that fork in the road where much like Robert Johnson made his deal with the Devil, I decided to shake off living in a completely cordoned off world of Testamints, Thomas Kincaid paintings and unnecessary dogma. For that, I find Gold extremely empowering to hear.