VICIOUS CYCLE – “Pale Blue Dot”
Deranged Records reloads its roster of Canadian punk and hardcore bands like the top tier college football programs do to their rosters each year after graduation and the NFL draft. With rarely a misstep, and always a plethora of raw talent, Deranged continues to impress at an inordinate pace, and the latest band to support the claim is VICIOUS CYCLE. Pale Blue Dot is a reference to Carl Sagan and a famous photo of the earth taken from space in 1990 by Voyager 1. At the time, it was the farthest view of the earth ever produced. Sagan later penned a book with the same name. The band doesn’t take its title association lightly, as one of the 13 songs is named “For Carl.” I can definitely get on board with any 80s style hardcore band with a thing or two for astronomy and philosophical musings related thereto. (NASAcore?)
While listening to the unbridled angst and ferocity of VICIOUS CYCLE that pours out of Pale Blue Dot, I felt an urge to dig deeper into Sagan’s writings, and I found this passage, written in regards to the photo in 1996: “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” Sagan could have been a fantastic hardcore lyricist. Anyway… VICIOUS CYCLE have an interesting duality to their sound – the intentionally minimalist recording style clearly wants to look back to an earlier era, but the band’s musicianship is far less sloppy than the sound quality would suggest (not unlike their buddies in FUCKED UP), and lead singer Nico Taus has a howl that stands out as its own unique element. It’s one of those “Bigfoot eating a lumberjack” kind of howls, and according to the band’s promo photos, there is a decided lack of “burly man” to support this style of singing. In its 28 minutes, Pale Blue Dot does nothing to disturb the momentum that starts on the opening note – a unique hardcore it’s not, but the band plays to its influences in near perfection.
