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Panopticon > Social Disservices > Reviews > PhilosophicalFrog
Panopticon - Social Disservices

Church - 95%

PhilosophicalFrog, February 7th, 2013

It seems actually treacherous to write down how I feel about this album. Part of me is hesitant to put into words the emotional drain this album has done to me over the last year. As long as it exists , Panopticon’s Social Disservices, remains a towering force of black metal and musicality in my life. It is perhaps the single-most poignant example of an album that has the maturity to be as heady as it is, and the musical execution to justify its lofty goals of “covering new ground” in black metal.

Normally when an album or band comes along in metal and has some sort of new ideology driving it, it can be hard to tell whether or not it is genuine, or if the paradigm shift it brings if genuinely worth doing at all. For example, no one takes a band like Liturgy seriously. Hunter spouts off his strange “transcendent black metal manifesto” jargon, sounding more like a freshman in college who just read Walden and wants to piss off his parents with his new endeavors, than as a genuine fan of metal for what it is. He immediately sounds like an outsider, trying to “raise” metal up to his standards with his music, because it was somehow beneath him before Liturgy existed.

Yet, on the other side of the coin is a band like Deathspell Omega, or Funeral Mist – who while rightfully receiving criticism for their “religiousness”, are never once doubted for an actual commitment to metal as an artform. Both bands in interviews sounded almost as cartoon like as Hunter, but never sounded as if they were embarrassed by the elements of metal – they relished them – and instead of trying to “reclaim” metal from immaturity, took to metal as the perfect vehicle for their gospels of destruction and chaos. One cannot argue that a band like Deathspell Omega has not “covered new ground” in metal – indeed, they have single-handedly dragged metal to a noisy, blurred conclusion – but one also cannot make claims that they ever really left their black metal roots, in spite of how discordant and “different” they may sound now.

So, what of Panopticon then? Why do I mention towering figures like Arioch or Hasjarl and imitable whelps like Hunter Hendrix alongside Austin Lunn’s prized child? It is because Lunn somehow managed to find a middle-ground between these two extremes of those trying to carry out their metallic vision. He created Panopticon with the vision of social justice in mind; to create albums about the horrors of the lost, forgotten, and terrible real fears of abandonment and nothingness. Lunn opted out of the fantastic and the mystical traditions of black metal in favor of the harrowing stories that real people, in real life, face. Satan is not a being, or a force of rebellion, he is in the faces of the men around us, and Lunn makes this dreadfully clear.

This is what is meant by “maturity”. We are told constantly by society, school, family, and friends, that things like fantasy and rebellion are immature, that they do not have any real grounds and belong to the minds of children and little boys who break things with sticks. Arguably, shying away from the tired treads of Satanism and still create dreadful visions within metal is enough to show “outsiders” that we are more than a community of virgin woman haters, fantasy nerds, people who like to dress up, and rebellious hellions. We see Hunter Hendrix here. But, what is vastly different in Lunn’s music is that he used metal explicitly, and there is no trace of wanting to expand to a larger crowd through gimmicks like books and justification.

He plays with his influences on his sleeves – we see Mayhem, Darkthrone, and the early pagan black metal bands as well as My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division and hardcore acts inspire his riffs. He runs the gamut of the metallic world, creating droning headspaces, suffocating razor-sharp black metal riffs, crushing post-metal moments, and grandiose sweeping melodies to fashion together a Frankensteinian aural monstrosity. In a way, Social Disservices reminds of another modern classic; Oxbow’s A Narcotic Story in that it seems to bite off more than it can chew, with its vast array of influences and its difficult subject matter, but yet manages to pull it off so incredibly well with its pacing and structure, that it becomes a sublime moment.

That’s exactly what passion does. It turns what everyone should expect as a massive failure into a profound moment of humanity. This album, like any album created with the fiery passion it was, serves as a loud reminder to the rest of us who create or wish we could create. During the moments of terrible joy and sadness, it becomes the loud cry of “WE ARE HERE, WE ARE HUMAN AND WE EXIST”. This becomes exceptionally evident during the beautiful melodies during “Client”, where the violin accents the twisted snake-like guitars, tearing down the boundaries of what can be considered a beautiful moment – drenched in its metallic heaviness, but the subtleties of its texture give way to an intensely touching moment. Or perhaps it is when the post-metal breakdown of “Subject” becomes the crushing validation of a forgotten child’s existence, with Lunn screaming to all the suffering in the world: “Never give in, never give up” after accounting in gruesome detail the fates of abused victims.

When an album has four songs, the shortest being nine minutes, one can safely look at it and assume some measure of monotony. But, Lunn avoids this with carefully placed samples, synths, tempo changes, style fluctuation and vocal delivery. Each song becomes a mini-epic, telling a story in such a complete and invested way, that the listener is forced to honestly consider whether or not he or she should continue. Social Disservices is an exhausting album. It is a tiring album. It is a rigorous and demanding album. But, it is demanding in the same way crafting beauty is, that loving someone is, that watching someone you care for die is, that piecing together your life after it crashed around you is: that it is something that you must do, it is something that consumes you, and the fatigue doesn't come until long after you look back on what you truly care about is finished, or loved fully.

Within each quarter of the album there is a new sense of dread, fear, horrible sadness and yet underneath this current of human misery is the bedrock of hope, escape, and redemption. I would say that no song exemplifies this existential condition better than the final track “Patient” does. A magnificent, transcendent, haunting and beautiful track that runs through each human emotion possible with a terrible swift sword – from the crippling sense of dread and hopelessness immediately back to anger, shifting serpentine into a final sense of wonder and purpose. By the time the violin comes in for the final melodic movement, you will be weeping or you will be thrusting a fist into the sky. It is the culminating moment not just of the album, but of all the experiences the children Lunn speaks of, in musical form.

This was the first album that after I listened to it, I had to truly stop doing whatever it was I was doing (See? I can’t even remember what I was doing when I put this album on, maybe writing?) and sit. I sat for a long time, as the cricket chirped the final notes of the album, thinking of whether or not I myself could create something as intensely meaningful as this album. Lunn and Social Disservices had me question whether or not it was worth it to continue to consider myself an artist, as if I could craft anything like this musically. I was drained, I was scared. It was a moment of such intimacy that I had forgotten that it was “metal”. I just heard the souls of Lunn’s subject matter cry out, and the honesty of Panopticon.

Perhaps it wasn’t as hard to put into words as I thought it was going to be. Maybe it’s because it all poured out so quickly that I have yet to really look back at what I have written, maybe it’s that because this album means so much to me that the words themselves will never feel adequate, so they come easily, as I know they will not do it justice. Perhaps though, it was because when listening to this album again while writing, I was filled with that very same awe inspiring feeling of “we exist” and the immense passion that accompanies it, and that me, and everyone else, can make something as poignant and beautiful, and continue to fight against the horrors of the world.

Perhaps I am no longer talking of just writing reviews.

That’s what passion does. It separates us from the world just long enough where we feel we are invincible, and that nothing can tear us down and gives us the inspiration to continue in spite of the trepidation of life. Lunn has tried to give that to the abused, and I hope that they hear him, because he has managed to give that to someone as undeserved of it as me.