BSPH: Death Ride`69 - State of Decay

"State of Decay" is the song by an American tribal industrial gothic rock extraordinaires Death Ride`69. It was released in 1989 on an eponymous album "Death Ride'69". It is rockabilly psychout with some goth sensibilities and transgressive attitude.

Thematically, "State of Decay" covers an evergreen topic of ceasing to exist and explaining the nuances of this unknowable but intriguing process. It don't have much to say about it - but it repeats all the buzzwords over and over again in overly theatrical manner.

The songs starts with soft female voice humming "it is just a dream". After that the drums kick in and the word of the moment is "nightmare". The drum sound is wrapping the listener around with its rusty sheets. Over time the wrap gets tighter and tighter until it starts to squeeze the air out of the composition and then immobilizes it. Curiously, it all comes together neatly in the end.

The bass joins in a bit later. It jumps around in a checkerboard pattern. The arrangement of the bass line represent the throbbing heart trying to break free and break out of the chest. Supposedly, it wants to run away to some dark corner and just lay there. In the same time, the guitar is crooning in the background painting a lifeless wasteland that was burned into the crust that was then showered with rain for an eternity.

The voices whirl around with some spooky verbiage. It is limited to the key words so it can be considered as some sort of conditioning thing. After a while the words stop making sense and turn into just another sound in the song.

The thing with this song is that is sounds like a run a through the swamp that dried up, fossilized and turned into a dusty spacey tomb. The song is built around a tribal drum stomp. It was a war drum that went "nah! and just went syncopating and galloping forward towards nothing with an intention of making a direct impact that will never come.

The drums take the spotlight for a while and do absolutely nothing with it. They just go on pretending that nothing is happening and there is no reason to expect anything special with that particular thousand yard stare that suggests something exquisitely horrid going on behind it.

Then the guitar finally comes to the forth and does some buzzsaw swirls. It is like that Dumbo tornado that's too far away to make an impact but visible enough to make an impression. And since this didn't worked out - the sound abruptly ends with what can be described as hammering the final nails in the coffin.