On the phone Saturday morning my dad told me he was reading an article about Richard Nixon ranting against blacks and Jews in the White House. Now, Nixon's been dead a good while and this was a long time ago to start, but there was still a pure anger in my dad's tone, a crystalline disgust that such egregiousness even occurred, especially in such a place of power, really, the place of power. His reaction, that cool, vile hate is what it felt like to see Light Asylum later that night, them clearly pissed at something—the sound man, each other, hard to tell—and singer Shannon Funchess not moving her body a great deal but contorting her face with such putridity that that strong voice that emerged came across with a very clear, high quality aggression. And while they are certainly no death metal band, Bruno Coviello's synthesizer action often owing as much to The Cure as to Ministry, there is an undeniable, classic heft to Light Asylum. There are vampires on the air waves, Funchess sings, a public service announcement, not a shock. The anger springs because you know these things keep happening, not that they happen in the first place.
Stream: Light Asylum, "End of Days"