"What can we do when the war is all around?
The veins are constricting.
The pressure is coming down.
Everyone knows we're living in a world we just can't trust.
Left in the wind to die in the dust.
So we spoke up.
Crazy,
ugly,
illegitimate,
never again.
We are the symptom.
We are the thorn in the side.
They scream 'til it hurts.
They can't sleep.
I want to be one of them.
We try.
We bleed
endless
broken
white
lines."
I consider Witness to be the greatest hardcore album ever written. Someone once said in an interview with Jeff Eaton (MLIW's vocalist, and a personal hero of mine) that Witness was the album they had been waiting their whole life to hear. I most definitely echo this sentiment.
The greatest 10 minutes of my life was spent smoking a cigarette with Jeff Eaton, Brooks Strause (an acoustic solo artist, whom i also adore, and good friend of MLIW), and my friend Dave, discussing comic books and literature.
Listening to Witness is (and seeing MLIW live was) the closest thing I have to a religious experience. From the moment I hear the opening chords of "The Outsiders" until the final drum beat of "Hair Raising Accounts of Restless Ghosts" my heart is racing, my brain is burning, and my fists are clenched. When I hear Modern Life Is War it is almost as if I am transformed into something else against my will. Anyone who has seen me/pictures of me at an MLIW show (or who has seen Kevin, Dave, and I drunk enough to dare to summon the demons within us for the heretically sacrad dance of mosh) knows what I'm talking about. This band makes me feel something that no other band (and nothing else in life) can. I have never felt as connected to any person, place, or thing as I do to Witness.
Sadly, since MLIW broke up (2/18/08) I can't even bring myself to listen to this album unless I'm in a borderline-suicidal state of self loathing and despair. Listing to Witness, knowing that I will never hear a single song off it performed live again, brings the blade closer to my wrists than any other cataclysmic life event has or ever could.
MLIW live shows were the highlights of the past 3 years of my life. I would give ANYTHING to be able to see them just one more time.
The worst week of my life, and the straw that broke the camel's back of my philosophical world view (solidified my nihilism), occurred in February of 2008. Oink.cd (the greatest file sharing community in history, and my personal fountain of art) was shut down by the U.S./U.K. government. A few days later MLIW broke up, and a few days after that I broke my bong.
Can you honestly tell me that you could believe in a god that would take the only 3 things that provide you with (something close to) happiness away from you over the course of 7 days?
Alright enough of my inhumanly gay worship of this band...
Here's my best attempt at a review of my favorite album of all time:
Witness is a somewhat atypical hardcore record. Excluding "John and Jimmy" and "D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S." the album is mid-to-slow-tempo and the guitar work can best be described as dark, dissonant, and tragically haunting.
Jeff Eaton is my favorite vocalist of all time, and Witness is his finest work. Every lyric of this album is dripping with profound anger, anguish, and animosity towards the human condition. Every breath Jeff takes seems to be his last and the songs are so haunting that it might make your brain bleed out through your eyes. Eaton just doesn't bare his soul, he lights it on fire and then abandons it to slowly burn out as a pitiful display of the futility of human life.
To put it simply you will never hear a piece of music as profoundly emotional as Witness. I would bet my life (not that I value it) on it.
Enjoy
Wait... I take that back. Don't enjoy this album. Bleed it.
"...and we don't care anymore.
I don't give a fuck
'cause I'm one of them.
Our rebel hearts will turn restless ghosts.
They can never truly kill us
and we will never truly die."
R.I.P.
Remember, kids, Hell Is For Heroes.
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