Imagine a world where bad things don't happen. Where there's no despair, no loneliness, no warfare, no suffering. A world where people don't feel alone. A world where people don't die. Hope Of The States wouldn't exist. There'd be no need for them. There'd be nothing for them to feed on. You only need hope to cling onto when youčre aching to get out. When there's no pain, there's no need for hope. You're there already.
You can never know why someone chooses to take their own life. You can piece together the circumstances, torture yourself with cause and affect, but if you're still here to turn it all over you'll never understand. All we can say for sure about the individuals that recorded this album is that they must be highly sensitive souls. You wouldn't be able to write these songs unless you felt the melancholy of the world more keenly than others. And sometimes those feelings just pile up and up and up.
You probably know the musical antecedents of this record. The majestic sweep of Sigur Ros, heartache caught gloriously in slow motion. The apocalyptic fervour of Godspeed! You Black Emperor, post rock succumbing to fire and brimstone. The itchy, 360 degree paranoia of Radiohead, the feeling that the radar is always on, picking up the hypocrisy, avarice, ambition, deceit and casual, underhand evil of the human race, even when you want it to stop, just for a second. On paper it can seem a dark, depressing combination.
But what Hope Of The States bring and what, in theory, they offer up for the lost and desperate to cling onto is...well, hope. The central messages of this album are fine ones. "Keep your friends close/Your enemies won't matter in the end". "Don't be alone or frightened by all that you see/There's a million good hearts like you and like me." "You're not alone when the lights go off/Stand together when it all stops." And, most importantly, "No self pity, we sing yeah yeah yeah yeah."
Solidarity. Friendship. Put the wagons in a circle. There's a power in a union. All noble and worthy sentiments. Some would say some of life's most valuable lessons. But when you get to the album's core, it all falls apart. On "Me Ves Y Sufres" (Spanish for "You see me and you suffer"), there is no redemption, only defeat. "I used to think I had something to say/But my dumb ideologies gave me away"; "It's so desperately sad that my life has come to this/I hope there's something better than this for me"; and, most depressingly: "My mistakes happen so much it's success". There's enough self-loathing in there to last a lifetime.
They had to carry on, of course. That's the essence of Hope Of The States. That no matter how bad it gets, you keep forging onwards, keeping your loved ones close and those bleak thoughts as far away as possible. This album didn't need a death for it to come loaded with poignancy. The fact that one happened isn't so much a reflection of what lurks within these songs but what lies outside of them, trying to get in. Because that dream world doesn't exist. And until it does, we'll always need hope and people who remember it.
by Ian Watson