Rwake
- Story by Kevin Stewart-Panko
Southern sludge demons get cryptic and criminal with Voices of Omens
The dudes from Rwake can’t stop talking about how evil has permeated every sludgy, tar-thick iota of their band’s latest release. Voices of Omens sounds like Chinese water torture on doom metal’s forehead; like Eyehategod wired on cough syrup; like Norway’s black metal inner circle renewing their arson spree, starting with the building Black Oak Arkansas and the Allman Brothers jam in. Both vocalist C.T. and drummer Jeff (no last names given) wanted to call their first album for Relapse O Satan, Move in Our Voices (after what you hear when you spin part of Styx’s “Snowblind” backwards), but the rest of the Little Rock-based sextet thought that evil did have boundaries. Fret not—you can still soak in Voices of Omens’ nefarious artwork, themes and moods.
“Relapse came up with the art,” explains C.T. of Omens’ visual backwoods spookiness. “We sent them the ideas. We told them we specifically wanted deer heads on sticks, kinda like Lord of the Flies. The kids in the book are trying to ward off evil; we’re trying to have evil warn people not to go any farther into the woods. If you look carefully, there’s barbed wire, wolves and does and baby deer strung up in the trees, their guts hanging out of their stomachs. It’s pretty brutal.”
“Ever since we started this band, there’s always been something going on and our schedule has always been full,” adds Jeff. “We never had a chance to sit down and complete the songs. This time, we cleared our schedules to concentrate on writing. It was good to be able to really work and not have it be ‘now or never.’ I think that’s why the record sounds so complete. Plus, the sound [producer] Sanford [Parker] got is just unbelievable; the fucking drum sound…” he gasps. “It just makes for a more horrific and agonizingly evil experience.”
Then, there are C.T.’s lyrical themes.
“The song ‘The Finality’ is specifically written about my uncle, who was an evil motherfucker. He once gave me, as a gift, a .22-caliber gun with the serial number scratched off that he got from the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He’s not even a racist so much as he was a guy who was into everything evil. He was a heavy-duty drug dealer who used to fly cocaine from Colombia. He was just a wrong dude who committed ‘forced suicide’ in prison.”
But you don’t sound so evil, C.T. Truth be told, Rwake come off like a bunch of happy-go-lucky good ol’ boys.
“I think that’s because we save all that miserable shit for the music,” laughs Jeff. “We push all that stuff inward so that it works its way out when you’re standing there with your guitar or whatever. There’s no telling what kind of person I’d be without this music, but it’s one of the reasons I’m such an easygoing dude. I don’t take any shit out on people; I take it out on my instrument.”
