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| HAIL THE BLACK MARKET |
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| INFO |
YEAR FORMED: 2005
HOMETOWN: Ventura, CA
MEMBERS:
Nik,
Joe,
Matt,
Balt,
Joey
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| BIOGRAPHY |
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As your car descends the rolling hills of Los Angeles’ farthest and falsest reaches, making headway against a few hundred more miles that squat between you and San Francisco, the Southern California sun disappears, buried beneath a cloud cover as monolithic as it is absurd. Welcome the Oxnard plain, cry the factory farms, tract homes, and blunt aroma of fertilizer and refuse heaps. Speed on. And you do. But should you stagger your pace and squint your eyes until grey moisture renders itself translucent, out of the musty suburban strip-mall malaise slithers a run-off of honesty and creative vitality that has little other outlet than the spawning of a band like Hail the Black Market. A five-piece puzzle disfigured by seemingly incongruent musical and ideological influences, HTBM brings forward an emotive indie rock that sews melodious engagings and sour chords enlivened by Far, the vocal calamity of the Mars Volta and Coheed and Cambria, and the epic-like song structures and rhythmic betrayals ushered by Fugazi and Black Sabbath. Delayed guitars, salty bass lines, and flighty percussion vacillate in their intensity, aptly keeping pace beside Joey Madrid’s singer climbing and falling meditations on modern life, social hell, and unchecked Americanism. The derivative sound, as with that of the Birthday Party or early Hot Water Music, births a convolution that becomes richer and more beautiful the longer you lend your ear. Perhaps this is by chance, or perhaps the guerilla band has found a loud way to stage a quite coup upon their gloomy plain of fast food and chain stores. That is, rear your head from the cheap, short-lived pep, beat senseless by the parlance of fallowed trends, and push back with a wall of life, carbohydrates, and volatility. This is hard battle to win and thus a rare sound to find. It is not mass-produced, nor could it be by definition. So tip your scene cap. Bat an extended eyelash. All Hail the Black Market.
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