Music as Ancient as Today

 
In a way, the cover of the Dallas band Course of Empire's just-released debut 
tells the story of the album in a single image. A silhouette - hazy, indistinct, 
but clearly human - is crouched over and boxed in by a charred and pitted 
rectangle of light. We see the figure, but we can't see what he is doing - he 
could be surfing, he could be praying, he could be doubled over in pain. He (if 
he is a he) could be a caveman dancing to his ancient gods; he could be an 
astronaut caught in the light of a distant sun. 

For that matter we don't even know what this image is - a photograph, a 
lithograph, a computer-generated illustration. It might be a print that has 
been is some grandmother's attic for the last 50 years, or maybe it was laser-
printed earlier this year after being created with the latest software 
available. Who can tell, and what difference would it make?
 
Like that cryptic image of light and shadow, Course of Empire's music is at once 
many things, though what precisely it is remains elusive and indefinable. It is 
obvious that a story is being told through the songs of this self-tilted album, 
but after a while it becomes impossible to discern whether it is a story the 
band is telling, or one you are telling yourself.
  
Course of Empire is one of that second generation of Deep Ellum bands that 
formed in the wake of the scene's initial uprising, and a buzz has hovered about 
the band seemingly from the first night it seized control of a downtown stage. 
Its live shows are staggering displays of primal bonding. It contributed one of 
these standout tracks (God's Jig) to Triple X's Dallas compilation, Dude, You 
Rock, earlier this year. It also is one of the few local bands the Austin music 
press has ever deigned to praise. 

So, in a way it is no surprise that the album is good. Since word went out that 
the band would record with Allan Restrepo's Carpe Diem label (which earlier 
released Rhett Miller's solo album). that has been treated as a given. But how 
good, and in how many different ways, is something that no one but a lover or a 
manager would have had the temerity to predict. 
 
Course of Empire's debut is one of that rarest of entities in pop music today: 
an album that works as an album - that is, as a collection of songs that in 
some thematic sense creates a unified text. With most songs now seen as isolated 
expressions that can only randomly comment on or relate to each other, critics' 
terminal pronouncement that "the album is dead" (like "painting is dead") has 
become the guiding cliche in these post-postmodern times - a sure sign the 
album is about to experience a rebirth. 

And probably without even realizing it at the time, Course of Empire has 
recorded an album in the old-fashioned sense of that word, but one that achieves 
that sense in a new-fashioned way - this is not Hotel California.. The album 
open with a man delivering a deathly speech, the savage broil of guitars and 
drums swelling up and around his still born words of rage, bitterness and 
denial (Ptah). The album closes with a single guitar slowly climbing out of a 
new-day chorus of bird calls and cricket trills, the wordless music all 
serenity and acceptance even as the sounds trickle away into silence (Dawn of
the Great Eastern Sun).
 
Building everything on the percussive foundation constructed by its two drummers,
Course of Empire scatters webs of chattering guitar noise and recitations of 
obliquely vivid lyrics over tribal beats and primitive rhythms. For all their 
postmodern noise and technological dazzle, these songs have the primal core of a 
war dance being pounded out around a fire. 
 
Mike Graff's guitar is all over the place, squealing and shuddering in a chaotic 
frenzy one moment (Cradle Calls) and gently echoing in a swirl of chimes and 
texture the next. 

Not to strike too morbid a characterization, but death is hanging heavy about 
this album. Indeed many of these songs have singer Vaughn Stevenson confronting 
or reflecting on not just the inevitability of death, but man's hastening and 
seduction of it, while the band around him rages or celebrates. The closing of 
Thrust - with Mr. Stevenson chanting over and over again, "I'm alive" - 
crystallizes the desire at work here: As our ancestors did, Course of Empire 
makes music to mark its existence, as a declaration of life being lived. In a 
world so shaped by death, survival is the most radical act of all.