Young Elk have always delved into the personal when creating their dark sound. Debut The Dark Side of the Holy Ghost was born of a brush with death and crisis of faith, lead Ezekiel J. Rudick confronting his own mortality and finding not divine light but a cruel black. Broken promises lie at the heart of the Young Elk sound, not only from God but America too, Rudick’s writing that of a man slowly falling through the surfaces he once trusted to hold firm. What if, when the scales fall from your eyes, there is nothing left to see?
Their latest album, appropriately titled False Paradise, goes further still, mining into the darkest recesses of Rudick’s experiences to produce something unapologetically bleak. The result is not a pleasant record, but then it was never intended as such—any discomfort in listening dwarfed by that involved in the creative process. As Rudick explains:
False Paradise was exceptionally intense to write and record. At first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to make this song a part of the record, but as the concepts of the tunes developed it not only made perfect sense to include this on the record, but that this would be what the entire album is centered on — this horrifying true story of my childhood where I was sexually abused as a five year old and how no one believed me when I tried to articulate what happened to me.
The misgivings are understandable, and the effort of writing about and sharing such experiences could only be understood by those who have experienced similar violence. What the story does make clear is the position from which Rudick is writing. False Paradise is not the product of some juvenile flirtation with performed nihilism but a considered attempt to chart a storm from within, to pin down every crumb of guilt and disgust, every long night and hollowed morning. Because, when the world is revealed to be a lie, a false paradise, perhaps the only course of action is to strive for some shred of truth.
“This record is really a study of what happens trauma goes undealt with,” Rudick continues. “Abuse begets abuse.” The sentiment brings to mind ‘Dark Meadow’, a story by the American author Adam Johnson. With his talent for turning the dial past the ordinary, Johnson is more on the nose about the cyclical nature of abuse, but the effect is similarly striking. Living in the aftermath of childhood abuse, the narrator fights his own urges to harm children, and the story’s disturbingly human voice refuses to give an inch. As with False Paradise, Johnson’s story is dark not because he wants it to be, but because it is, and to readjust the tone would be to lie, to betray oneself.
‘Scenes from the End’ makes this clear from the off, Young Elk acknowledging the weight of the album as if in warning. “Oh, god damn,” Rudick sings, “didn’t mean to write another song / about this grievin’ / and all the shit that had gone wrong / But here I go again.” There’s something of Pedro the Lion in the its willingness to reference itself and retain its serious tone, the desolate space whipping up around itself in the closing moments, a small peak of anger that gathers and disperses upon a flat and distant plain.
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Broken promises are at the forefront of ‘Gossip Magazines’, a single which acts as a neatly devastating summation of the record’s themes. “The American Dream has been found out as no more than a compelling sales scam,” we wrote in a preview. “Ruddick’s protagonists occupy a world where the foretold joys of love, intimacy, prosperity and religious salvation never come to pass, every inhabitant haunted by the lives they could have led, holding their stillborn dreams and refusing to let go.”
The title track confronts Ruddick’s abuse head on, plain language stripping everything but the heinous truth of the moment, a mundane moment turned hellish, with no path back. It is this inability to overcome the event or turn back the clock that marks the rest of the record, every comfort found insultingly trivial or maliciously empty. This might register as a grand tangle of anger and accusation (as on ‘Every Little Bet’), or a slow slide into alienation (‘Hanging Paper’), but the whole spectrum of emotions is united by the exclusivity of the suffering.
Because abuse begets abuse, even if only in retaliation against the unjust singularity of pain. No-one can reach you at the point of your distress, no-one can make it go away. To believe that they can is to not only underestimate the trauma but to fuel it, regurgitating the guilt and horror. To believe that is to create a false paradise, where salvation is found by merely asking hard enough.
At the end of ‘Dark Meadow’, the narrator is given a chance to reveal the identities of child abusers. The police urge him to do so, asking him to consider the kids. “What Officer Hernandez doesn’t get is that once something bad happens,” Johnson’s narrator thinks, “it happens every minute of your life, and it can’t be undone, not by a rescue or raid or a rope or a hundred and forty thousand dollars. The time to act isn’t after, it’s before, it’s now.”
False Paradise is out via Holiday Breath Records and you can get it from the Young Elk Bandcamp page.
