Seeking Refuge

No wonder no one ever talks about this album… in fact, if one doesn’t visit the page here, he/she may never know that the band had a third. Yep, the guys went on a very low note… truth be told, they never truly excelled at their chosen field, but their first two efforts were pretty listenable fares, competent thrash/crossover slabs modelled after their peers, the peerless Suicidal Tendencies.

It was pretty unsurprising for the old school purveyors, the ones who survived all the way to the mid-90’s, to look for refuge in such uncertain, plain unhospitable times. And here they were, our friends from sunny Venice, California, knocking on Heaven’s door full of hope that their third instalment would somehow pass the admission test to these lofty dimensions. If only this third charm was at least slightly reminiscent of their second joke…

alas, it isn’t. This is a downright terrible surrender to the ruling at the time music caprices, a most banal concoction of grunge, groove, alternative and other trendy 90’s atrocities, all influences piled on top of each other with very little thought and care put behind the creative/arrangement process. It’s really hard to believe that this album was actually half-ready for release in 1991, and only the departure of the guitar player Adam Siegel and the drummer Greg Saenz (they both joined the Mike Muir’s initiative Cyco Miko) precluded its timely showing. Well, under the circumstances, it’s no wonder why the two musicians left: they were simply too terrified with what they and their comrades had come up with.

In this particular case signing with a major label (Capitol Records) was tantamount to a stylistic degradation seldom witnessed on the metal horizon to such a deplorable extent. From long dragging alternative rockers ("Unenslaved") to plastic groovy boredoms ("Hair Like Christ", "Plastic Cracks"), to ludicrous sleazy charades ("Take Your Part Gotta Encourage")… the embarrassing kaleidoscope is near-complete, but not without the mention of the excel… sorry, excessively long quasi-progressive non-sense "Drowned Out", the guys’ failed flight of the imagination. No, they shouldn’t try those, they’d better stick with the sticky poppy sing-alongers like "United Naturally in True Youth" which may receive a couple of frowns from the Poison and Cinderella audience even... or with half-baked tributes to the Seattle movement (Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, etc.) like “Overtime”, an overtime, also overdose of trite bluesy grungy tunes that may hold even the completists in stuporous disbelief.

Dan Clements has no choice but to assist this shameful musical scenery, and the man finds the perfect vocal accompaniment for the purpose, emitting cheesy melodic croons that wind and unwind in the same perfunctory plastic manner, leaving a solid aftertaste even despite the fact that they do fit the music at play. It’s just that it requires a gigantic stretch of your integrity to acknowledge someone’s decent participation in this… it’s an ill-fated metamorphosis, to put it mildly, one that somehow suits the time of release when anything went… but to think that this could have seen the light of day in 1991…

no, I refuse to ruin my day envisaging such a career-destroying scenario; it’s not that the band had much to defend, if you think of it… and it was by all means good that the 6-year buffer softened the impact from it. Still, it’s near-impossible to exonerate the band for smacking such a recording. Refuge was firmly denied them, in Heaven and on whichever other door they had the temerity to knock with this. The band never officially split up after that, but kept a relatively low profile until 2006 when Clements joined ex-members of his idols Suicidal Tendencies for the formation of the crossover project AgainST. A series of live recordings started popping up in 2009, naturally not containing even a single track from this already forgotten third stint; and even rumours started circulating that the guys may even come up with a collection of new tunes… great; cause we all know that these will be nothing, and I repeat nothing, like this shelter-seeking mess served here.