HEAVY DISCIPLINE

The Khe Sanh Approach - I Am A Demo Suzuki (White Label)
FREE from www.theksa.co.uk

July 2005

 

If there was ever a band to kill all hippies, you would imagine the KSA could be it.  Simply, their music is brutal and violent, but strangely pleasing, like dropping a milk bottle on solid concrete (try it sometime if you don't believe my hype). 

Anyway, as the Khe Sahn Approach sing "machine guns... machine guns... kills all of our problems..." repeatedly, you'd be stupid to think they mean it.  Mass genocide, kids, is wrong.  Though I'm sure the NME would have you believe otherwise.  But eventually the irony loses context and becomes literal.  It's scary.  It now appears they're saying, with a perfect straight face, everything that anybody with a vaguely anti-war, or even a simply humanitarian, mindset is opposed to.  It's alienation bordering on revulsion.  You get the feeling if the chorus could be anything in the world, it'd be a mass grave.  Given that some of the human race are spiteful, vile creatures you can forgive this self induced shock, and if you want any providence of their overt political convictions you only need listen to the music, which is enough to shock anyone out of mindless apathy.  Fuck it's name (Ayatollah, noun, religious leader in Iran).  This is a Vietnam song.  You begin to imagine yourself lying in bed in Saigon, in nothing but your boxers and dog tags, staring at a rotating ceiling fan.  And it's rotating in time to the opening bleeps and beats of 'Welcome Home Ayatollah'.  Who needs musical influences?  Journalistic egotism allows me to suggest 'Apocalypse Now' influences the KSA more than any number of pathetic white guitar bands.  Like Martin Sheen travelling further up the river, they lead you further and further away from humanity and it's basic values, into their personal armageddon.  You find yourself strapped in the Clockwork Orange brainwash chair "watching the world end on News 24" surrounded by "Che Guevara merchandise".  They're an intelligent bunch, this lot, there's no better image of failed ideology than Che on a t-shirt.

Oh my, feel the irony.  Just as 'Welcome Home Ayatollah' sounds like a world war, 'Maire Celeste' pinpoints some fierce anti war polemic.  Maybe I'm wrong, but using tired clichés to promote peace ("I cant see world war three kicking off in the bedroom") is about as illustrative as singing "flower power" or "fuck the system" and expecting some kind of global revolution to kick start.  The dangerous thing with the Khe Sahn Approach though, is just as you reach a self satisfying conclusion about their relevance they somehow manage to sidestep you.  Therefore, I now believe this lyrical, seemingly anti-war stance is less political, but more irony (you need a fully honed bullshit detector to negogiate this record).  A vicious attempt to obligingly illustrate everyone's (especially bad music journalists) desperate efforts to pigeonhole and depersonalise, our failures to distinct between the personal and the political.  Of course killing people is bad, but can you simply state "war is bad" in plain english enough times and expect it not to lose effect? 

If I ever hear a fifteen minute warning whilst sitting alone in my bunker awaiting impending nuclear apocalypse, I now know what to listen to.  'Crocodile Teargas' cuts like a razorblade through all life's peripheral bullshit, leaving a diatribe of distilled existence.  If any song could hold you between eternal oblivion and nirvana, and have the bollocks to refuse to let go, this is probably it.  You are trapped within recurring images of riot cops turning the air red, as failed revolution after failed revolution passes by, from Paris 1968 through Cuba and Russia, and worst of all, in the KSA's world, but not in Gil Scott Heron's, their 'revolution will be televised'.  The scary thing is though, you are reminded that revolution's still within reach if you really still want it, but after this this song you probably don't.  Still, it's dark and threatening, reminding you that the human race can be so morally fractured that the only thing that could make some people cry would be teargas.  See if Stalin sheds a tear over another Gulag prisoner, or Pol Pot over another unmarked grave.  It's bleak.  But sometimes you need reminding that the world ain't been such a nice place over the years.  By the end of it, after the last few minutes of feedback and r2d2 bleeps, you are forced to the edge of your pathetic existence and forced to dress yourself down.  Journalistic license dictates I can say, without appearing pretentious, you'll feel like Winston Smith at the end of 1984, staring back at your shrunken corpse, wondering where your mind went wrong.

If we didn't live in a nice woolly liberal democracy, the Khe Sanh Approach would be thrown in the Gulags for being too inquisitive.  And they'd probably deserve it.  They are a very clued up band, but this is not enough for me, especially in 2005.  Luckily for them then, their tracks aren't divided into 'rants' and 'tunes'.  Unlike every other skinny whiteboy band who think they can change the world with just a grunt and a guitar, they have tunes compatible with their attitude.  If the morally conscientious ever sought a soundtrack to combat international terrorism, this would probably be it.

www.geocities.com/heavy_discipline