Dangers photo by Reid Haithcock
We’re pleased to bring you the premiere of Dangers‘ new album The Bend in the Break (listen below), which is scheduled to be officially released on October 14th through Topshelf Records. While you stream the new album below, read the track by track provided by the band.
You can also check out the album’s lyrics here.
Dangers is a hardcore punk band from Los Angeles, California. They have been playing basements, garages, living rooms, squats, warehouses, banquet halls, high school auditoriums, Adriatic beach resorts, abandoned Soviet furniture factories, and public park gazebos since the winter of 2005. In their decade of existence, they have booked their own tours across the United States, Europe, United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and Southeast Asia.
After self-releasing two critically acclaimed LPs and two EPs on their own Vitriol Records, they are now pushing their third LP, The Bend in the Break. It is an attempt to locate the band within the rapidly changing landscapes of both loud music and our rotten culture-at-large, and finds the band incorporating its roots into a sound and performance more their own than ever.
The Bend in the Break features photographs made by vocalist Alfred Brown IV, many of them from quieter moments spent on tour. The fractured nature of the cover is emblematic of the band’s take on the world: cracked, distressed, but not yet entirely broken. The Bend in the Break was recorded to tape at The Atomic Garden with producer Jack Shirley, the band’s close friend and sometimes-tour-mate.
Purchase The Bend in the Break here.
TRACK BY TRACK
1) Human Noose: There is a line in a song called “Tarantula Type” from our last record that states, “A head in the clouds is a foot in the grave.” That song was about my paternal grandmother who I helplessly watched disintegrate headfirst into schizophrenia and paranoid delusions that, ultimately, robbed her of her golden years. But the haunt of those days still sits with me: is it not more rational for the mind to resort, as hers did, to insanity given what nonsense we tacitly accept as modern life? We’re all just doing our best, it seems these days, to make sense out of the nonsense we create and abide. This is a song for those who find solace in dreaming amidst the crashing bore.
2) Those Sad Plebes Down Below: I often face the suggestion of the more “conservative” elements of my family that I’m nothing more than a “bleeding heart liberal.” As with much of this record, we wanted to articulate some notion of futility that comes with locating ourselves in liminal spaces. Thoughtful engagement with and questioning of the men and women tasked with governing our society can leave you feeling haggard. Neither pole seems particularly capable of affecting the sorts of change we truly need to pursue a more human(e) society,
3) Darkest Arts: The tenor of our (inter)national conversation on race seems everyday to grow but more deaf to the subtle nuances of identity-making. We favor, instead, blanket statements and the complexity simplified. This is not to suggest that systemic failures are a myth, but rather to texture the conversation with the possibility that our understanding of race is far more heterogeneous than our census bureau would have you think. As a “half-black” kid raised in suburban wealth by the beach who is both the “blackest” and “whitest” kid on either side of his family, I tend to feel little affiliation with any race. “I’m not,” as the song says, “the skin that I’m stuck crawling within.”
4) The Bend in the Break: Sometime during the middle of writing this record, my childhood best friend called me from New York to tell me that he’d been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. This was the person that I discovered music with, that I played in my first bands with, that actually recorded the drums last-minute on our demo tape. We met in summer school between 6th and 7th grade, during that awkward time when life at the edge of the western world means beach and booze and bourgeois. We opted for Black Flag and Descendents. When he told me, I was sitting at the barbershop, waiting to get my haircut, and we both erupted in laughter. Life had snuck up behind us when we weren’t looking and traded away our youth for a new phase of life whereby things like cancer and divorce—and even death—these weren’t the heavy things happening to the adults we knew and were raised by, these were the heavy things happening to us. “Where’s the line,” I wonder on the song, “between the young and whatever else that we become?” This song—this record— stands, for our band, as a testament to that line. That murky estuary where we’ve all been forced to revisit our priorities, or hopes, the dreams we’ve got to let go. For some, the bright lights still beckon. For others, the grit of life has got itself in the way. For the four of us—and for my best friend, now in full remission and engaged to be married—treading water is more than enough.
5) Kiss With Spit: This entire record is about inhabiting interstitial spaces—physical, psychological, and emotional states which exist between two poles. This song in particular is about the landscape between love and pain, sex and violence, masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, aggression and tenderness, the gamut of which we regularly experience during our shows. How strange is it that anywhere else I would be enraged, but that during our shows I can be punched, hit, spit on and leave feeling as though something wonderful just happened? The ultimate feel of the song is to suggest that we engage with our limitations, even when they are painful, even when they are difficult to stomach, because there is beauty and catharsis to be found in the grit, in the filth, in the honesty, and in the confusion.
6) Loose Cigarettes: A song ostensibly about Eric Garner, the man strangled to death by NYPD cops in Staten Island who was originally stopped for selling loose cigarettes on the street. It’s told from my point of view as a half-black man who once lived in NYC, and whose half-brother is LAPD, but also as someone who recognizes the lengthy history of minority marginalization, and the apparent futility of protest. I can’t watch any of these viral videos documenting the slaughter of humans without feeling nauseous both that such things occur in what is supposed to be an “enlightened” age, and that I have not yet figured out any way to stop them. “We’re trying to breathe, but we’re choking on words like pig.”
7) The Great American Songbook…: The core of this song is about hearing Nirvana for the first time when I was 11, sitting in the backseat of my friend’s sister’s car, hearing her blast the music on her tinny speakers, and realizing in Almost Famous fashion that there was a music more alive and electric than the Kriss Kross and M.C. Hammer tapes I had grown up on. It’s about my first live music experiences being in tiny rooms with people playing actual instruments, joining in circle pits and losing my head…and the sadness I feel when I meet young people today who are introduced to music via EDM and festival culture. This song marks a huge departure for our band in terms of it being quieter and subtler, but we wanted it to be at the heart of a record so focused on its “bend.”
8) Softer Science: Justin, Chris, and I are teachers, mainly of the humanities. This song references the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot (“women come and go talking of Michelangelo”). The idea is that love, even at its most perfect, is ruined—heightened? gutted?—by death, unless both parties die at the same exact time. It’s also an oblique critique of the typical, Disney-themed romance, which ignores the pain and struggle intrinsic to real, hard-won relationships.
9) It’s the Devil I Love: The title and refrain is lifted from the Neko Case song “Hold On”. Neko Case is my favorite living artist and someone who has inspired a lot of my own approach to music and performance. She’s honest in a way that I feel is very rare these days. And is capable of lyrics which bend gender and femininity into a tornado-strength maneuver away from the comfortable poles we favor these days. Anyway, that song deals with her position as a woman in the man’s game of attraction. Our song imagines my nieces as they grow up and have to deal with men who, even when (like I tend to think I am) they are at their best of intentions, can cede their respectability to their animal side. “Oh, young American girls in young American rooms with young American dreams in young American wombs. No matter how much you pray, no matter how much you hide, there’s a dorm, there’s a church full of American boys drunk on American thighs singing: If it’s the devil that’s in me, then it’s the devil I love.”
10) The Straight World: This song arose from a relationship I had with a woman who was physically abused by both her father and stepfather. As she confided in me the things that had occurred, I had the realization that some of the carnal acts which we had shared were akin to those she was describing, and it put me in a position of being disgusted not only with those men who she should have been able to trust, but also with those base, animalistic facets of myself which help create an atmosphere whereby men in general have for so long nudged our notion of masculinity into a definition which marginalizes women and normalizes the violence we perform on them. “Everybody’s just a body in the end. We’re not family. No, we’re not even friends. We’re just bodies to bruise, to bend, to break, to borrow and lend. It’s the twist of the sheets. The smell of cheap cologne. It’s the daughters we father so we’re not sleeping alone. In the straight world.”
11) Very Small and Weak in a Land of Barbarians: The title here is from a letter written by the poet Dylan Thomas to his wife in which he describes drinking at a bar and being disgusted by the brainless village idiots that surrounded him and were clamoring on about news articles and politics of the day. The song has references to my car (a black Hyundai Accent) and to a magical place out in the CA/AZ desert called Felicity which holds the distinction of being the official center of the Earth. The hope here is to place this song near the end of the record to give a sprig of hope: that even when personal life can be crippling (the song is written as a reflection on the dissolution of a serious relationship I once thought would result in marriage), the earth itself, devoid of humans—in places like the desert and the Grand Canyon and Iceland and and and—that we have traveled to as a band, these places can be a cure for the pain and loneliness inherit to our modern world. “And if you listen close, you just might hear it whisper, hear the earth call out your name. Nudge you to the edge. Let you peek inside. And pull you back again. It’s whispering your name. It’s whispering your name. You’re not alone. No, you’re not alone.”
12) …In Sharp Decline: this interlude is a reprise of “The Great American Songbook…” Live, we use this song as a hinge and improvise its length and add happenstance lyrical content. It’s aim is to evoke a somber, reflective mood toward the end of the record, and it takes cues from songs like “I Wish I Was the Moon” by Neko Case, and “Werewolf” by Cat Power, and maybe even the album Song in the Air by Elliot.
13) To Finn, With Our Regrets: Written as an ode to our friend’s son, and as a lament for the harm we as human beings seem dead-set on inflicting to the earth. 3/4 of our band is vegan, and 4/4ths of our band is highly conscious of what we as human beings are doing to destroy this place wholesale. As a close to the record, the idea is that no matter how myopic we get, no matter how we come together in small celebrations (like that of Finn’s parent’s marriage), things like love and happiness and joy stand no chance of perpetuating if we continue to act as irresponsibly as we so often do. “And we never cried. We felt no pain. And we danced all night under acid rain. And we never cried. We felt no pain. We doused your parents in that cheap champagne. And we went dancing on graves. We danced straight to hell. We went dancing on graves, for days, ’til we had danced ourselves into that soil.”
Dangers Tour Dates:
October 20 – San Francisco, CA @ Thee Parkside
October 21 – Oakland, CA @ 1234 Go! Records *
October 22 – Los Angeles, CA @ TBD
October 23 – Los Angeles, CA @ All-Star Lanes *
November 10 – Portland, OR @ Blackwater
November 11 – Tacoma, WA @ Real Art
November 12 – Seattle, WA @ The Black Lodge (w/ The Exquisites)
November 13 – Bremerton, WA @ The Tiki House (Matinee show)
* w/ with Super Unison
