Cast Iron Hike

Stretching the scope of hardcore

by Carly Carioli

On January 9 of this year, Victory Records -- one of the two or three most respected and powerful hardcore punk labels in the country -- posted a news bulletin on its website. "There is a new band on Victory Records," it read. "They are called CAST IRON HIKE. They are from Boston and we like them."

Simple and to the point, utterly devoid of any trappings of hype or hyperbole. Still, it was a big step: there is an audience (not a huge one, but relentlessly devoted) that trusts Victory to sign credible, authentic bands and will take the label's recommendations to heart. Although it made its name as a bastion of straight-edge orthodoxy, Victory has also begun to branch out. Enter Cast Iron Hike, who aren't straight-edge, and whose recent debut album, Watch It Burn, puts them somewhere high on the list of bands who have been trying for the better part of the past decade to stretch the lyrical and musical scope of hardcore. Yet they still see in the vast underground network of 'zines, labels, clubs, promoters, and fans a place and an ideal that is worthy of belonging to.

"The greatest thing about [labels like Victory] is that because we're on the label, people are going to pay attention to it somewhat and give it the time of day," says singer Jacob Brennan over drinks at an Allston watering hole. "What I dislike about the way that people look at those labels is that they automatically assume because you're on one of those record labels that everything's changed, and you're now this big fucking band -- which couldn't be further from the truth concerning us -- and that you've got all this money and all this fucking acclaim, which is just bullshit. Things are still just as tough now as they were seven months ago except now -- now [the kids] expect something more, which doesn't piss me off nearly as much as some kid saying, `Oh, what did you do with your advance money, you fuckers.'"

Bottom line: Cast Iron Hike are still a band in transit -- while they still strive to live up to hardcore's mythology, which is that the music must maintain no illusions, they're hyper-aware that the veneer of having no illusions can itself be an illusion. When I suggest that a label like Victory has merits simply by existing outside of the consolidated oligarchy of major-labeldom, Brennan shoots back, "Victory is distributed by Sony, though. They're distributed by R.E.D. (Relativity Entertainment Distribution) which is owned by Sony. I mean, I trust what you're saying, I believe it, but my feeling is that you can get just as fucked if not more fucked by a big independent label than you can a major label."

So much for simple platitudes. "I think if there's one quality we share with more traditional hardcore bands," Brennan continues, "It's that energy -- and that energy isn't just exclusive to hardcore, it's something that got lost in popular music for a while."

JACOB BRENNAN grew up with the indie spirit in his blood. His father is Dennis Brennan, a singer/songwriter in the Americana field who's released two well-respected albums (with sidemen including Morphine's Billy Conway) for the roots-rock label -- and one of the country's bigger indies -- Rounder. Through his father, Jacob seems to have been imbued with a sense of the breadth of American music, as well as the continuity of certain values -- authenticity and dignity being key among them -- that reach back as far as the blues and bluegrass, and continue right up through hardcore.

"I got in a huge fight with my dad," says Jacob. "I was stubborn, and I totally didn't agree with him, and after three months of thinking about it I still can't admit I was wrong. [He was saying] look at Hank Williams and Bruce Springsteen, two guys who are really traditional, who really started out folkie and eventually blew up and became huge. And the songs that blew them up were songs that they deliberately wrote to be hits. Like "Born To Run," for Bruce Springsteen -- he recorded 40 versions, or some obscene number of versions, for that song. And he had lost the record label so much money that they were like, we're gonna write a hit and make our money back. And they did, and Springsteen went on to make Nebraska, which is incredible, it's one of probably my five favorite records of all time. You can't fuck with that record, you can't argue with it -- he totally meant it. And he wouldn't have been able to make it if he hadn't made "Born To Run." Not that "Born To Run" is a bad song -- it's a good song. But the motives behind it weren't very dignified."

I mention that producer/critic Jon Landau had a lot to do with playing up Springsteen's working-class roots into a blue-collar roots mythology. What arguments about authenticity seem to ignore -- at least as it's boiled down in traditional hardcore's "keep it real" mythology -- is the power of rock and roll to transform, empower, and liberate the people who play it and experience it, whether it be a kid who finds that punk rock changes his life, or some guy like Iggy Pop who found in rock and roll a license to become someone else.

Brennan ponders this for a second. "Maybe it's that you become more of yourself on stage," he says.

CAST IRON HIKE formed about three years ago in the wilds of central Massachusetts -- they all came from locations in and around Worcester, and still practice in Brennan's hometown of Clinton (Brennan and guitarist Michael Gallagher are now Boston residents; drummer David Green lives in Worcester, bassist Pete Degraaf lives in Shrewsbury, and guitarist Christian Pupecki still lives in Clinton). Gallagher worked in a video store and bugged Green -- who'd been in a hardcore band called Backbone with Pupecki -- to play together. Brennan remembers harassing Gallagher in much the same way. They shared a love of New York hardcore, but also a willingness to expand on its themes. "We knew when we started jamming together that the things coming out were really good, but it wasn't [traditional] hardcore," says Green. "And we knew that we didn't want to be a hardcore band but that was just basically where we came from, you know, this hardcore background. And I would hope that hardcore would be willing to expand."

Watch It Burn bears out those intentions. Their take on high-energy, cathartic, and intelligent metallic hardcore matches the crunching sonic intensity of the Cro-Mags with the post-hardcore futurism of Quicksand and Burn, and emerges as one this year's best hardcore release thus far. The key event in the narrative drive of the album is Brennan (a critic and columnist for 'zines including Extent and Punk Planet) leaving Clinton for Boston. "There came a day when I pulled the carpet out from under my world," begins the album's first song and title track, kicking off what amounts to a concept album about leaving and starting over, a dissection of a mid-youth crisis in full bloom. It's partly about having the courage to trade in the comfort of numbing, rote familiarity for something far nobler and precarious; but it's also about the harsh consequences of leaving the womb, the doubling-back regret and intense internal negotiations that come with trying to transcend one's roots.

"Specifically [the song] `Watch It Burn' is about Clinton," says Brennan. "But it can be anything. I was in Clinton last week for the holiday with Chris, and we were talking to this kid who we didn't grow up with, who was younger than us. He was a fan of the band -- Clinton kids have always been super supportive of us. But he was all bummed out and insulted towards us because the record is potentially about Clinton -- in the song `Watch It Burn' especially -- and he couldn't understand why we would feel that way. And after trying to explain it to him, giving him specific reasons why we felt that way . . . he still just couldn't get it. So finally we were like, okay, then it's relative to you. It doesn't have to be a town, it can be a shitty job, it can be anything that you were thrown from out under. And the kid didn't get it, he took it too personally. I don't feel any allegiance to Clinton, Massachusetts at all -- none -- or to Worcester or even to Boston. [The kid] actually said the most ignorant thing I've ever heard. He said, `Hardcore's all about representing where you're from.' And I was like, `no, it's not.'"

It's precisely those lingering feelings he seems to be battling in "Watch It Burn." When he sings, "With no reason for leaving"-- by which I think he means no good reason in the eyes of everyone else, and every reason that matters in his heart -- "Is this treason?," it's nothing so simple as allegiance. It has to do with, once you've loosed yourself from your constraints, where you're gonna call home -- and that can be a physical place, or it can be a state of mind. The guy in the song knows he has to leave -- to burn the old place to the ground, or at least purge its lingering hold on him from every fiber of his being, or else be consumed by it -- but he still has doubts, and he hates himself for it. "I made my best mistakes every now and again in that tired mill town," he sings at one point, almost irresistibly drawn back to it like a moth to a candle.

Even on the sections of Watch It Burn that employ the crunching sturdiness of metallic guitars -- a heavy/hard that can't help denote certainty and steadfastness -- Brennan's voice, soulful and elastic and imprecise compared to the average hardcore bark or even emo-core lamentation, says something different. It's the voice of someone who's questioning the music's infallible conviction, a voice that seems to be just barely hanging onto, or running circles around, that monolithic metallic certainty.

The relationships described on Watch It Burn after the title track are intractably suffocating -- they're the prequel to that first song, one long flashback in which the singer does battle with his own inertia, a cycle of frustration that leads backwards down the pike from Boston to Clinton, or from enlightenment back to a time of youthful desperation. That's part of the subtext to the chorus in "Boxed" that broadly and brashly declares "Youth is a myth." Which isn't exactly their last word on youth -- youth is something they keep almost reluctantly returning to, championing it despite their waning belief in it as a redemptive force in their own lives. "This is frightening and this is profane; the way that we ease into age," goes a line from "Workhorse," a song that is less about choosing age over youth than demanding a showdown between the two, looking for the kind of elusive cataclysm that'll give them closure and maybe some definitive idea of just where the hell they're headed.

The moral of hardcore's stories is that sticking to your ideals -- no matter what the consequence, no matter what suffering it entails -- always pays off, even if you end up lonely and broke, because (to paraphrase Whitney Houston) no one can take away your dignity. On Watch It Burn, after the title track's initial declaration of independence, the ensuing 11 tracks ask a deeper question: is the singer living up to his ideals, or living down the consequences of them? "Living lightly is no reason for us to live at all," goes a line in a close-up of one moment in a doomed relationship, "Let Me Down (So I Can Feel O.K. About Myself)," "So maybe I shouldn't come around." But I kinda get the feeling that after all was said and done he did come around again. The last line in "Workhorse," near the end of the album, says "Despite who knew that I didn't want to be with you/I didn't want to die alone," which is a disarming and absolutely naked moment. The album's last song, "When There's Nothing Left" (to say, maybe?), doesn't really offer much in the way of resolution -- it throws everything up in the air, and lets all the serrated pieces fall where they may. Que será, and all that. You almost have to go back and listen to "Watch It Burn" again, to remind yourself that in the end (or the beginning, as it were), everything worked out for the best.

Back at our table in Allston, Cast Iron Hike repeatedly stress their commitment to those very traditional hardcore morals: hard work, sacrifice, emotional honesty. After our interview, Brennan will take Green and Gallagher back to his apartment for pasta, because they're all dead broke, and they wouldn't change a thing about it because they're doing not only what they love, but the only thing they can imagine themselves doing. Which, as far as these things go, is as happy an ending as they come.

Cast Iron Hike will play on the main stage of the Warped Tour at the Three County Fairgrounds in Northampton on July 29. Tickets are $19.50. For information call (800) 477-6849.