Friday 8th April 2011
OLD MONEY 4: THE LAPSE – “THE THREAT” (1998)
Look out of your window. Does it feel like the world is ending? Look inside. Does it feel the same? It’s a certain kind of narcissism that allows us to believe that we are the first to have these particular feelings of loneliness, isolation, alienation and apocalypse. Yet these are the prevailing themes of humanity; alienation and hopelessness remain a timeless commonality. Does it make you feel better to know internal desperation is an eternal, everlasting struggle for all?
And yet it remains difficult to shake that feeling of impending doom. Perhaps it’s our vain belief that our moment in history is the only moment in history, because we are in it? That the value of experience is always shaped by one’s own subjectivity? “The Threat” seems to be concerned with this very dilemma.
Led by the brother of the more widely known Ted Leo, Chris Leo’s The Lapse existed for a brief period of two albums in the late nineties, before shaping into some other bands also unfairly destined for obscurity (Enon being particularly notable). The reference to the more famous (all things being relative) sibling is not simply a way of ascribing some form of familiarity to The Lapse: there’s the same themes of political discomfort that concern Chris as with Ted, even if the form chosen to communicate them is slightly different.
Whereas Ted’s Pharmacists lean on first wave punk and hardcore for inspiration, The Lapse were slightly more in tune with the NYC underground. Very much of their time, they took cues from the artful noise of Sonic Youth and Blonde Redhead, but were melodically guided by Leo’s stream of conscious diatribes that seemed to run an A-Z through contemporary political philosophy. Obviously left leaning, Leo was nonetheless never overtly stating allegiance with one side or another, simply pointing to the hypocrisy and vanity that drives power in whatever form. On “The Threat”, those concerns seemed to coalesce into a kind of historical subjectivity, whereby Leo’s own malaise was positioned in the context of the general desperation of humanity – “be it 17 more years or 700, who cares?”. As he sees it, this particular Threat has always been with us, now there are just new ways of talking about it and communicating it on a mass scale to the world. As such, our desperation just grows louder and more widely diffused.
Lots of people talk about the end of the world, but nobody talks about The Lapse. Since they dissolved, the blogosphere has emerged as a space in which obsolescence isn’t so much planned, as it is a necessity. And yet “The Threat” is about an enduring problem: the good times, like the bad, are constantly slipping away. The fear, though, is always with us. As the sinewy energy of “The Threat” suggests, it doesn’t paralyse us. On the contrary, we wouldn’t do – or be – anything without it.
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The Lapse – “The Threat”
(Photo: Marina Sloutsky)
