Deceit

The horrors of Cold War are something humanity kind of forget a bit too much. Clearly, people often look for the previous war that happened before the rivalry between USA and the Soviet Union took place.

I need everyone to remember how fucking hostile that period was. Some of the most vile things happened during that period in the world, like the Latin America coup d'etats, and the collapse of the MK-Ultra project in "1973". (although the thing was oficially discarded in 1992). The scale of the tensions was so high I imagine the fear, despair and how many people cried everyday for years, fearing the nuclear war that would kill all us.

Deceit is an anxious album, expressing all these tremors and dangers. Each time the world was put onto the verge of cataclysm, the people would ask the same questions. Who will drop the first nuke? Who will be the first target? How much it'll last? The entire concept of the album is who will fuck up our entire lives forever. The thread between life and death we are everyday is terrifying. Every innovative aspect from this album is pushing the boundaries of punk as much as This Heat felt they could, because, at any moment, the nuclear war would have started.

And all of us would go to fight for the greed. Feed the blood for the earth of those who never cared for it. The atmopshere encapsulates a reality where the bombs fell across the sky, and to the clouds. Deceit is the music version of the movie "Threads" from 1984, one of the most disastrous and terrifying representations of a nuclear winter in Britain. I imagine the movie were the visual nightmares of every member. For your consideration, the hatred towards government from by Charles Hayward, the drummer, was born at 12 years old, in the notes of the song "Sleep". This album is one of the few times I saw Experimental Rock to be really political at all.

The consequences are facen in tracks like SPQR, where the point is see how far the destruction would go, and the backwards push the nuclear annihiliation will cause, refering the collapse of the Roman Empire, as a metaphore of the descent of humanity. The album is plagued of imagery of governments, like the cover, depicting presidents of USA like Reagan and Carter, the flag of USA in the mouth, nuclear tests imagery and many things that were recovered from pamphlets of security in case of a future magno-death.

The World War of 1933 was meant to be, the War to End all Wars, and that was the biggest lie the human power sold to everyone. According to Cenopath:

"A war to end all war. And the war that came after that." It wasn't. We just prefer to shit ourselves around the power and brutality over citizens as a way to dominance over us. It's not a thing of victory and peace. It's abusive power around it. That sounds cliché, but if you expand the panorama, we all have blood in our proper hands. The movies about coolness of war, the suffer of soldiers, the impression of the fight scene, the trenchs of the sieges, and the descent kamikazes killing themselves for represent a nation, thinking they would get remembered by name for their actions. I mean, it's not their fault. Not too much. They were forced to kill.

We use entertainment as a fetish to understand that, letting ourselves live in consumerism (let's see Paper Hats and Shrinkwrap) because it's our only safe place from massacres. But what happens when it's too late? "Radio Prague" is the final warning before the inminent destruction of Earth as we know it, because Makeshift Swahili is the exact moment where everything dies, like a complete explosion letting us to blindness, defeat and death. A cry. A despair help. The album also represents biblical devastation.

The anger of God, because we tried to play to be him. Actually, the second half of the album is his benevolent dissapointment and frustration at how U.S. got the God's power to destroy. So he will commit the genocide of humanity, because we forgot what we were. Love, peace, liberty and creativity. Expressions were meant for us to justice with devastation, instead of a safety to better times.

Deceit is an album about 2 different cataclysms. The destruction of the world in hands of the hegemony USA has become thanks to lurking power in 2 wars, and greed for control of what we consume, listen, hear, believe, eat, see, witness, read, write and even, look. That led us to fail the divine mission of the creator, and just, doing the final job the nuclear bombs didn't: wipe us all. It's pessimistic, destructive, sad and terrifying like no other avant-garde album. A dense dream inside a nightmare inside an hallucination inside a trauma inside a fear. The fear of death.

We don't know when we will be nuked. Who will be the first one? When it will begin? We can't prepare ourselves because we aren't aware at how and when it will begin. And the worst part about those fears... is you don't know... when. In your house, or the other part of the world.