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Poison Idea - Feel The Darkness (American Leather/Vinyl Solution pressing) pt. II

Fuck it… I’m writing about the b-side of Feel The Darkness today because I listened to it  like 3 times while driving around town yesterday, and for the here and now it fits right into my life.

I got pretty serious about the album yesterday when posting and I still feel pretty good about all that I said. The B-side though really is only a hair less perfect than the A. It opens with Alan’s On Fire, which is some real darkness. Heavy, midpaced, and hateful spring to mind as Jerry details a suicide where the victim sets himself on fire for all his family to see. It’s some low spirits shit, but it’s also sincere in the anger that comes across.

Step on me I’m here for you to see
I hope you choke as I go up in flames
I told you my problems but you never heard a word
This is the moment for once in my life I will be heard
I know there must be a better way but I don’t know how
You’ve lied to me and you’ve ignored me
but you won’t now

This is arguably the most bleak and desperate moment on a record that’s dark as they come. It just chills your spine and makes you feel sick.

The album doesn’t totally sink into the murk from here, there’s still more bellowing anger to go around. Welcome To Krell, though not what I’d call a signature track has a cool main riff that skips up and down the frets kinda start-stop-like, and keeps things running at a hardcore/Kings Of Punk type clip. Nation of Finks follows quickly and laments the way the code of the streetshas fallen to the wayside as well as the rise of constant surveillance of private citizens. Backstab Gospel probably comes the closest to a filler track on an album like this. It doesn’t have tuneful and catchy delivery of most of the other tracks, and would sound more at home on one of the previous Poison Idea lps (it might be a hold over from War All The Time), but I mean, that’s not a complaint. War All The Time is just as much a 5 star album in my book.

Painkiller follows, and it’s a classic PI drug and drink anthem. I can’t really relate, but they do a great job of stirring up the sound of addicted isolation, which as depraved and unsavory as it might be, was the reality that these guys lived (and some of them still do - R.I.P. Pig). I think part of what makes Poison Idea one of the greatest rock bands ever is that they always played music from the heart. Sometimes that meant they weren’t the most punk sounding band on the block, and sometimes that meant the words came from a pretty black place in Jerry’s soul, but that’s what makes it worth a shit.

Yesterday Judd posted this in the comments section about the title track and closing song:

Judd said: (November 7th, 2008 at 2:34 am)
Cosigned on this entire post. Also, supposedly the title track is about one of Jerry’s prostitute girlfriends who was murdered by a serial killer in Oregon, Dayton Leroy Rogers. “A sad description, five feet minus (two)” is a reference to the fact that Rogers would sometimes saw off the feet of his victims. Heavy shit.

I’m not really sure what insight I can supplement that with. It’s one of several PI tracks that start with someone opening and drinking a can of beer. It’s a slow and tortured song, clocking in at about 6 minutes, and it’s one of my favorite PI numbers, but that knowledge drapes quite a shroud on the whole thing, and also sort of brings into focus what this album’s really all about — the absolute most depraved and depth-sunk levels of American life. That’s nothing new on a rock album, but there’s only a few I can think of that paint the picture as vividly as this one.

At midnight my black heart’s fading - blue
A sad description, five feet minus - two
I can’t think about running back to - you
You started with nothing,but you ended up with less

We miss you Pig.