Although the band’s previous work certainly doesn’t qualify as easy listening, Russell Sbriglia and Rob Goc’s latest album goes even harder.
Densely layered, with long vocal lines that struggle against the current of bass and drums, this is not music that can be shoved into the background. Even when the only sound is a solo acoustic guitar, you can sense the thunder coming.
The track listing is as heavy as the album’s title—“D’entre les morts”; “Oedipus Wrecks”; “Future History”—with lyrics to match.
The opening stanza of “Citadel” is typical:
What was my incept date?
When did my life begin?
Can it even be called “life,” or must we coin a name for something else?
Something that exists
Yet for which words, they fail
They say that we’re replicated but now the synthetic is the real
The philosopher claimed
“I think, therefore I am”
Well, I think it’s time that we subjectivize, collectivize
And finally take command
Read off the page, these lyrics don’t seem to flow in a musical way. But there are so many drum beats for the natural stress in words that a strange equilibrium results.
Something similar happens during Slavoj Žižek’s guest appearance on “Let Them Rot (Antigone Between the Two Deaths).” Reading a collage of different texts, the Slovenian thinker’s distinctive voice is a perfect complement to Sbriglia’s, recalling Vincent Price’s famous cameo on the Michael Jackson song “Thriller.”
While it’s strange to hear Žižek in this context, his participation makes sense. Even when he maintains an ironic distance from his statements, he still wants them to be taken seriously.
Misconstruity feels the same way about Critique of Pure Desire. It might seem absurd to burden a rock and roll record with so much philosophising. But the band didn’t set out to make a parody.
When I interview Sbriglia over Zoom, he makes this clear, revealing just how much thought has gone into Critique of Pure Desire. It reflects the work he does in his day job as Associate Professor of English at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Although his scholarly background imparts an unusual range and depth to his responses, his exuberance prevents them from becoming too dry.
Asked what makes the album so cohesive, Sbriglia begins by discussing the songwriting process instead of the concept behind it.
“A lot of the songs are tuned to Drop D,” he notes. “Things were just naturally running into one another. The music dictated everything. Most of it is minor and lachrymose. I’d never tried to do a concept record before. It kind of just happened.”
This helps to explain why Critique of Pure Desire avoids the self-aware posturing that can make academics insufferable. Without lyrics or liner notes to read, the album could simply be considered a fine example of the prog-metal subgenre, which inclines towards thematic overreach regardless of who is making it.
The more I heard of the album, the more it reminded me of concept albums from the 1970s, when there was less pressure to produce hit singles and recreational drug use made it easier to find listeners willing to consume a record from start to finish.
Although Critique of Pure Desire can be appreciated simply for the way the music sounds, it rewards patient listening. The relationship between different tracks strengthens each time, eventually giving substance to the album’s title.
“The concept that unites all of the songs,” Sbriglia tells me, “is what psychoanalysis calls desire. Everyone understands the idea of a Freudian slip, where the desire is not what you consciously think it is. You think that you desire one thing, that this is the apple of your eye. But beneath the surface, something else is going on there.”
“The works of literature and film that I used as the basis for the songs,” he continues, “do really good jobs of staging how, in going after one thing, you’re really pursuing something else. Or, in pursuing something you think will complete you, it actually undermines or destroys you.”
To be sure, the album never approaches the sober mode of analysis found in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. But that’s the point. Pure desire is a terrifying phenomenon, permanently at odds with the rational mind.
In Sbriglia’s words, the overarching theme of Critique of Pure Desire is “desire as a form of self-sabotage”.
The chorus of “Malin génie” gets to the heart of the problem:
It’s not the last time that you’ll die
Victim of immortal drive
Imp of perverse on the rise
Soaring on your soul tonight
Even if you miss the Edgar Allan Poe reference, these lines communicate intense unease. Being a “victim of immortal drive,” diminished by a procession of little deaths, is not a fate to inspire envy. Yet when I ask Sbriglia about the song, his reply is disarmingly cheerful.
“‘Malin génie’ is a term that René Descartes came up with for ‘evil genius’ or ‘evil demon’, who is the deceiver,” he explains. How can we determine whether what we perceive is real instead of “just a simulation, The Matrix?” The difficulty of determining what exists outside of your mind makes it even harder to navigate the demands it imposes on you.
Now that the scene is set, Sbriglia pivots to a discussion of the song’s primary inspiration, the work of Edgar Allan Poe. “The Imp of the Perverse”, mentioned in the song, is both the title of a short story and a convenient term for a human trait Poe repeatedly examines. He uses one of Poe’s most famous tales, “The Black Cat,” to explain it.
“Science has missed this and philosophy has missed this,” Sbriglia declares, ventriloquising Poe’s point. “But don’t human beings have an inclination to act perversely, by which he means to act against your own best self-interest, something that undoes yourself?”
Although the narrator of “The Black Cat” loves the titular feline, “he has already cut out its eye in an alcoholic rage. Then one morning, because he loathes seeing what he did to the cat, he hangs the cat and says that he did it while the tears were streaming down his face and that he did it because he knew that, in committing that act, he would jeopardise his soul, literally doing evil for evil’s sake.”
As this account of “Malin génie” indicates, Critique of Pure Desire covers extremely dark territory. Yet the dominant impression it leaves with listeners is less hopeless despair than bemused recognition.
This correlates with the lessons Žižek is trying to communicate in books such as The Sublime Object of Ideology and For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor.
Maybe we won’t murder our beloved pet, as the narrator of “The Black Cat” does; or consign ourselves to excommunication, as Antigone does in the Sophocles tragedy; or force someone to adopt the appearance of another, as Scotty does in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the inspiration for “D’entre les morts”. But we are still bound to fall prey to the irrationality of desire, time and time again.
In a way, Critique of Pure Desire is itself a testament to this perversity. It’s a lot easier to convey this argument directly, as Sbriglia does during our conversation, than in an album of hard rock. Yet it is precisely the degree of difficulty that makes the album so compelling.
Part of the reason the project works is because Sbriglia has been making music in Misconstruity since before he became an academic. Although a lot of people you might encounter in doctoral programs have experience as “creatives”, making art, literature, or music, they tend to box that side of themselves up and stash it away as they professionalise.
Even when Sbriglia had to take a break from Misconstruity, such as when he was trying to secure a tenure-track job, he never consigned it to the past.
Many scholars would hesitate to invest so much time and energy in something that doesn’t “count” for their career. There is considerable peer pressure in academia to adopt a narrow focus. Outwardly perverse pursuits of a creative nature are frowned upon.
Ironically, Sbriglia’s decision to complement his day job with a creative pursuit is starting to seem more practical than the alternative.
Universities around the world are reeling from the impact of neoliberal economic policies. In the United States, where he teaches, this problem is compounded by the second Trump Administration’s attacks on all institutions it perceives as liberal, which threaten to cause irreversible damage to the nation’s higher education system.
When your government is subjecting your scholarship to intense digital surveillance, having a way to disseminate complex ideas without drawing negative scrutiny no longer seems like a waste of time.
Popular music has often struggled under the weight of concepts. For every Tommy, there are dozens of cautionary tales. Despite coupling dense music with dense theory, however, Critique of Pure Desire succeeds despite that burden.
That’s because of the record’s fundamental sincerity. Misconstruity aren’t making music in order to prove a point, but proving a point because they can’t stop making music.
Photograph courtesy of Matthew Tsimitak. Published under a Creative Commons license.
