«««EVERYWHERE that liberty goes, it leaves a path of destruction. Fast food, bad architecture, materialism, rampant greed, environmental destruction, imperial conquest, class struggle; these phenomena, when combined, seem to be synonymous with “Liberty.”––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
So just as it’s called “liberty” when war and greed stalk the land, they call the band Chain and the Gang. And like a true chain gang, they’re on the road to confront and defy any freedom-lovers that come across their path. They shuffle, manacled, across railway yards, and through graveyards; they’re on the side of the road, picking up the garbage as they walk, as people drive by, yelling at them. All they can do is become a chorus of metal meeting metal, hands hitting hands and a collective voice louder than one.–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
It started with one lifer (Svenonius) and grew to include a gang of small time bandits. How do they describe their sound? Something they just found. They dug it up from the ground. Essential to that soil: guitar, drums, organ, saxophone and chants; paying off our collective debt to the universe. There are songs with a driving locomotive engine (“Reparations,” “Interview with the Chain Gang”), a full-on choir of the disenfranchised (“Cemetery Map,” “Deathbed Confession,” Trash Talk”) and disentangled, soul-influenced invitations to a celebration (“Room 19” and “Unpronounceable Name”).––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
"Down With Liberty … Up With Chains" is simple and profound, the way a pebble on the beach is. There are no song cycles, sample beats, sequencers or baby pictures of the artist as a tot.
The Gang is set to shuffle across the Land of Liberty in February of 2010. Join them as they hope against hope, fan the flames, shake their fist and say “Yeh! Yeh! Down with Liberty! Up with Chains … Put those handcuffs on my hands."««««««««««
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