Primordial have released a new album. Actually, it’s been out for quite a
while now. Upon initial listen, it doesn’t sound like their best work. But then
I recall how it took me no less than a year of occasionally listening to
Primordial before I realised how brilliant the band is.
This new album is called ‘Redemption at the Puritan’s Hand’. Now, for
those of you who are familiar with Irish history you will at once be reminded,
upon reading ‘puritan’, of that darkest of figures in Irish history, Oliver
Cromwell. Obviously, the title imbues the notions of redemption from someone
closer to God and His will, and of death at someone’s hand. As is Primordial’s
style, they have never mentioned the English outright and, rather, prefer to
simply allude to them. Hence, their songs are metaphorical, sometimes ironical,
and often include very rich imagery and intense emotive expressions, which all
make their songs, for all intents and purposes, poems (you rarely say that
about any genre of music, let along metal).
The first song ‘No Grave is Deep Enough’ has the chorus ‘O death! Where
are you teeth? That gnaw the bones of fabled men. O Death! Where are you claws?
That haul me from the grave.’ and ends with a great lyric: ‘Rise, my brothers,
rise from your graves. No grave is deep enough to keep us enchained.’ I just
had the thought that this could so easily refer to the Croppies’ Acre.
Croppies’ Acre is an enclosure situated in front of Collins Barracks in
Dublin city centre. It was in this small patch of ground where hundreds, some
say over one thousand, of Irish men were buried in one mass grave after the
1798 rebellion. They were mercilessly tortured, marched out to their soon-to-be
graves in heavy chains, before being executed for ‘being’ rebels. Then, their
corpses were thrown into a mass grave. Made an example of by the British
authorities, buried in unconsecrated ground, their memory erased, forgotten
about by not only the British but also the Irish themselves, the souls buried
underneath that patch of grass are still very angry. I’ve been told by psychics
that many of those souls have not yet passed on into the next world. Such was
the injustice served to them that they can only but wait for those wrongs to be
righted, or avenged.
