SkyTigers, Eulorgy Review- Sean L. Maloney, author 33⅓:The Modern Lovers
It’s May Day, 2020. The world is gripped in panic. A virus has toppled economies, uprooted societies and sent the whole world scurrying for safety like so many rats at the first sign of storms. A fascist kleptocracy rules America as totalitarian governments hoard power across the globe. Good citizens are turning into good snitches as our food system collapses and the security state encroaches at an ever quickening pace. The music industry is imploding and corporate robber barons are trying to take over the culture. Seems like a real good time for some fuckin’ thrash metal if you ask us. It seems like a real good thing for SkyTigers.
One of the strangest things happening in this crisis, from a cultural experience, is how some works, long in the pipeline, feels so right for this exact moment. From the very first moment “Affordable Garbage” swells out of the void, from the second you press play, SkyTigers’ Eulorgy hits you like a hammer to a cathode ray tube. Shards scatter as the vacuum is breached; anger, fear and anxiety rush in. Feelings held at bay for the sake of survival are thrust to the forefront. And fuckin’ a it feels good. This is the promise of heavy music, kept in a time of crisis, necessary when most needed.
And there was no way that when SkyTigers were tracking their hardcore-crossover anthem “Denihilism”, screaming “you’re going to die alone, I’m going to die alone, we’re going to die alone”, they could have never guessed that the entire world would be in quarantine living alone, dying alone, together. Spooky? Yes. Prescient? Possibly. Exactly what you want in a hardcore song circa week 6 of self-isolation? Definitely. Paired with the sly humor by-way-of serious shredding of “Keep Christ in Christmas (and Out of Rock N Roll)” and demented juvenalia of “Nobody Puts Baby In A Dumpster (Stillborn in the U.S.A.), Eulorgy gives this dimestore dystopia of ours the absurdist wedgie it deserves.
That air of goofballs on the gallows stairs connects Eulorgy with the tradition of crossover thrash but also keeps it grounded in modern problems. These dudes aren’t ranting against Ronald Reagan; they're raging against the education-industrial complex on “Angel of Debt” and blasting back on “Grenade Point Average”. Running on the fumes of a society in collapse, the vapors of capitalism on the ropes, Eulorgy is Molotov-cocktail music for your teleconferencing happy hour. “Speak and Destroy”, “Antisocial Control”, “Truth Decay” these are songs that saw this shit coming from a mile away. These are warnings from ghosts of the future.
So as we celebrate the first Mayday of this new weird era, stick this one in your earhole. Let SkyTigers rampage through your brain. Let ‘em rip up the place. Let ‘em douse your noggin with high octane riffs and jet-propelled rhythms, let them flick a match at your highly flammable mental state. These are intense times, rife with contradictions and boiling over with conflict and discord. You need music that will see that intensity, raise it and call it. You need wisecracking hooligans with keen eyes for bullshit and the wits to call that bullshit out without flinching. You need an antidote to the system and all its horrors. Seems like a real good time for some fuckin’ thrash metal if you ask us. It seems like a real good thing for SkyTigers.
Sean L. Maloney, author 33 ⅓:The Modern Lovers