A Frames
I’m not completely convinced that industrial music will die when industrial civilization does. But old-school punk rock–a genre fueled by disgust, nihilism, and outrage–will almost certainly undergo a radical change in form if the culture that provoked its contempt in the first place actually goes tits up. That’s why the A Frames are the perfect Mad Max band. Instead of rooting for the apocalypse without wondering what’ll happen after the smoke clears, they imagine that the final calamity has already befallen us: “No churches no garbage cans / No punk no garage bands / No organism left to grow / Black forest and fallout snow.” How will the survivors carry on? Not by ranting and raving and bashing out power chords–raging against the machine is finally genuinely pointless, because the machine has broken down. To function at all, anybody still walking and talking will have to keep his terror and grief ruthlessly under control, buried deeper than a NORAD bunker.
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Unsurprisingly, ancient ruins and vanished cultures also figure into Sullivan’s lyrics. In “Flies” he makes a reference to the burial of Pompeii: “In the ancient city / AD seven nine / Frozen in ash / Smothered in time.” And the almost poppy “Memoranda” opens with the lines, “Like notches carved in bones / Like pictographic stones / In fragments and on cliffs / I read your hieroglyphs.” In this case there’s enough wiggle room to read the archaeological stuff as metaphorical: the implied “you,” who knows the speaker’s future, could be a romantic partner just as easily as an extinct graffiti artist, in the grand rock ‘n’ roll tradition of writing love songs disguised as almost anything else.
