Terminal City - Vancouver, Canada
December 9-15, 2004

Turn, Wheel, Turn
Bush too will pass, given Faith and the Muse

Longtime fans of Faith and the Muse might have choked on their chamomile tea upon hearing the band's latfest record. The Burning Season, for the first time. After being repeatedly tagged as "ethereal" or "romantic" throughout their ten-year career, the LA-based duo William Faith and Monica Richards have exploded the already broad range of their sound with an album that storms through punk and trance territory, and even manages to work in a bluesy torch song and a pagan come-on lifted from cult flick, 'The WickerMan'. Not necessarily an expected move from a band who once wrote an album centred on a Welsh myth cycle.

"It stemmed from a desire to burn down all preconceived notions of who we were; to destroy all definitions—even our own— and start again," Faith explains. If tracks like "Relic Song," a vitriolic attack on corporate 'punk' bands (sample lyrics: For my crimes I may not be remembered/The noble primitive hardcore disrespected) seem out of place for a band who have released odes to Shakespearean heroines, one need only look at Faith and Richards' pasts for a clue. Faith got his start in LA punk outfits like Wreckage before joining death-rock legends Christian Death, while Richards' art-punk band Strange Boutique evolved out of Washington DC's legendary hardcore scene. "I've been listening to a lot of the anarcho-punk bands I grew up with, like Crass, Conflict, Subhumans, Flux. I suppose I snapped after Bush was re-elected," Faith admits. Richards concurs: "We're both in a mood to revisit the time when this music was new and fresh."

Speaking of the president who can't handle pretzels, let alone foreign policy, the cliché about conservative regimes giving rise to fiery, pissed-off music is again proving itself true on countless records released in the wake of the ubiquitous 'war on terror' and the culture of fear it has birthed. The Burning Season is such a record, but Richards says it was crafted with an eye to a broader historical scope. "At the time we were writing the album, we had a serious fire in our hearts...it really was the western world's fear [after 9/11), the fact the world was changing and seeminglyhardening, and people become so afraid. That feeling inspired me to let people know that life has always been a struggle: we are lucky in our generation to have as much choice as we do in all things." The centrepiece on the album, "Sredni Vashar," sums this position up: "this is not a darker age, just a turning of the wheel."

But like I said earlier. The Burning Season is nothing if not varied, and it's certainly not a fin de siécle concept album. Richards' voice, the lynchpin of all of Faith and the Muse's music, smoulders on "Gone To Ground," which has hints of jazz standards like "Cry Me A River" but stays rooted in the band's own poetics. The band draws from Celtic myth and history for the echoing "Boudiccea," while trance and classical guitar are fused on "Whispered In Your Ear." Faith is understandably proud of the album's diversity: "I think it's even broader than our previous efforts, and thus a lot harder to pigeonhole. I think labels are incredibly restrictive when used as an identity rather than an initial description used only to garner interest."

In that spirit, the band's show on Sunday should deliver the dedicated and the curious a stylish and genre-crossing night. On the band's live dimension, Richards says the band has "a theatrical side, but we don't take ourselves too seriously. Anyone open to something new is usually very happy they came out to see us."

- Bruce Lord

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