Rude Awakening

Defeater w/ Rude Awakening, Threshold, Youth Funeral and Special Guest Friday, October 30 Doors at 7pm / Show at 8pm Advanced tickets: $12 Day of tickets: $15 (with Halloween costume $13) LISTEN HERE.  Unlike most bands—and especially most hardcore bands—Boston’s Defeater don’t write songs so much as they write histories, and specifically the history of a never-named New Jersey family whose already troubled lives disintegrate into torment, rendered all the more tragic for the depth and detail of singer Derek Archambault’s lyrics. And their latest Epitaph Records debut Abandoned—recorded earlier this year at guitarist Jay Maas’ studio, with drummer Joe Longobardi, bassist Mike Poulin and guitarist Jake Woodruff—is the most relentlessly raw and uncompromising chapter so far, powered by a renewed sense of artistic ambition and a plot twist no one could have expected. Their debut Travels started the story with the younger brother, a lifelong misfit forced to kill his father in defense of his mother, and forced to live with the consequences no matter how far he runs. Sophomore album Empty Days followed the older brother, dazed from the death of his father and fighting as his life dissolves into drinking and debt. And most recent album Letters Home was an surprisingly compassionate look at the father and his experiences overseas in World War 2, presented in a reverse-chronological order that transformed the monster from Travels back into the man he once was. The only family member left whose story hadn’t been told was the mother—and naturally, it was expected this latest Defeater album would be what Archambault calls their “grand finale.” But,” he says, “we constantly wanna throw everybody a curve ball.” And so Abandoned is revealed now as the story of a lapsed—or more correctly, collapsed—Catholic priest, whose battles in Europe during the war drag him first toward faith and then his own poisonous faithlessness. It’s a lens to examine questions of religion and pain and the ultimate fragility of humanity, as well as the way to a starkly Biblical revelation that places this seemingly-incidental character at the very heart of this Defeater family’s turmoil: “I’m definitely stealing from my favorite authors, where the person you don’t expect changes the course of the whole storyline,” explains Archambault. “Like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian—there are so many twists in how this core group of people are so affected by every person that enters or exits their path.” Abandoned was written and recorded in a welcome period of relief in Archambault’s life, after he’d finally received a life-changing surgery that repaired severe hip damage he suffered in an injury. For years, chronic pain had been constricting his life, interfering with Defeater’s performances and tours: “I was in so much pain I was clouded,” he says. “It made me a miserable prick. And now that it’s gone, I feel better.”  Archambault’s surgery, he says, allowed him to redouble his connection with his own writing, leaving him clear to truly inhabit what he calls his own Glass family—after the famous J.D. Salinger characters. As with everything Archambault writes, Abandoned is “fiction laced with truth, and vice versa.”   ABOUT RUDE AWAKENING Rude Awakening is a straightforward, no-frills hardcore band from the Merrimack Valley area of Massachusetts. Formed in the summer of 2011, they immediately released their demo and quickly followed it with “The Awakening” EP and a split 12" LP with Death Threat; working with both Arrest Records & Boston hardcore label Triple B Records. All releases were well-received, each one even more than its predecessor, which led them to tour extensively around the U.S. and Canada and attract the attention of Bridge Nine Records, who fired off their first full-length, “Collateral Damage”, in 2014. “Collateral Damage” is a pummeling debut, to say the least. Recorded in Portsmouth, NH by Dean Baltulonis at The Wild Arctic, it traces a beloved lineage of hardcore acts like No Warning, Leeway and Madball. R.A. barrels through the record, each song an under-two-minute juggernaut hitting just as hard as the bands that paved their way. Lyrically, the album revolves around front man Josh Hynes’ analysis of the cruel world in front of him. It is an enraged look at man's relationship with one another, the hardships of exploitation, control, misdirected belligerence and cold mistreatment.    ABOUT THRESHOLD  Hailing from the burgeoning hardcore melting pot of the Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts; Threshold are yet another band to be born from it’s great ancestry. Not-your-average hardcore punk/metal crossover, they tow the line with grace and ease between homage & familiar, old & new. With a new EP and only a handful of shows under their belt, they are already frontrunners to be the next-big-thing out of the always impressive MVHC community.