How are you getting on with that bitter rage that keeps burning away in your guts? Exhausting isn’t it? If you give it too much attention it gets suffocating, becomes the air that you breathe. State Violence, the fourth album from Remote Viewing is an attempt to confront and purge some of that choking misery. We’ve come to expect a punishingly fierce sludge blast and they still deliver, but for a band this heavy they’re surprisingly nimble.
State Violence is a title to match the times is it not? Quite surprised it’s not been used more often to be honest. It was already pretty well established subject matter in punk when Discharge put out the ‘State Violence, State Control’ single forty odd years ago and has remained a regular concern of loud angry rocks band ever since. It certainly feels sharply resonant today. From the seemingly unchecked terror of ICE in the US, to the UK government imprisoning pensioners for protesting a live streamed genocide with placards while leaving makeshift hooligan militias to menace the streets. Are we in the most dystopian timeline? Is the current apocalyptic fever worse or does it just seem more naked?
We’ve come to expect, even accept, a level of state violence, a bizarre compliance ritual to keep us all in line. It’s not just police brutality against whoever the government/media have othered, it extends to making disability benefit harder and a thousand small cruelties. The violence of denying healthcare, failure to reform housing, allowing the pumping of sewage into our waterways, the slow handover of the public realm to the interests of capital, the endless ways the state fails in its primary role to protect the populace. Been that way long enough, but it feels urgent right now.
Remote Viewing don’t go in for direct polemic so much as channelling the emotional weight of it all. Confronting life rather than attempting to explain it. You can’t really make out much of the words but the pain and fury is obvious. The video for ‘Retrain As A Swan’ cuts up old sixties footage into something that unsettlingly echoes the present day, overlaid with lines about keeping the conversation light and shitting out miracles. ‘Straight To VHS’ and ‘Disrespect The Arts’ keep things angry and crushing.
State Violence is an album of two halves. The first side rolls out four raging sludge punk slammers and the second sees them getting more expansive. ‘HUMAN RIGHTS’ drops the pace with a slowly unfolding riff, caustic screams and a poetic interlude which leads into some lovely cello (from Hannah Asprey of IAN). There are also guest vocals here from Ross Sergeant (of Pascagoula) that nicely contrast the cello. A stately droning intro leads us along a fairly pretty path into ‘Accidental Holiday’, before eventually the riff gets more combative and Ed Dudley starts screaming. It’s more epic and melodic than anything on the first side and probably the album’s high point.
On the whole it’s an even louder, angrier, heavier record than they’ve made before but to close out there’s a little light, ‘Birds of a Feather is on in a minute’ is a scorched and melancholy instrumental to play as the credits roll. Sweet and atmospheric with a title that allows for a brief return of the self mocking humour that’s been a constant since some of them were in Palehorse. They know loud underground rock music isn’t going to save the world, but it isn’t really a weapon, it’s armour.
