A failure and a breakthrough. The fate of the fictitious space shuttle USS Gloria’s crew parallels the path of real-life rockers Brave Saint Saturn in “Anti-Meridian,” the band’s third and presumably final album.
Dubbed the Saturn 5 trilogy, Brave Saint Saturn’s three studio releases chronicle a spacecraft’s ambitious launch, a cosmic catastrophe and the crew’s rescue and safe return to Earth. The musicians — frontman Reese Roper, guitarist and vocalist Dennis Culp, drummer Andrew Verdecchio and bassist Keith Hoerig — are the astronauts, and themes of loneliness, betrayal, survival and salvation echo through the striking imagery of the Gloria’s interstellar mission.
Brave Saint Saturn
Brave Saint Saturn was formed in the late 1990s as a side project of Christian ska mainstay Five Iron Frenzy, also fronted by Roper. Though faith features prominently in many songs and a few are outright praise anthems, BS2 devotes much of its catalog to confessional tunes exploring a range of personal and social topics.
Prominent allusions to both the band’s recording struggles — each of its three CDs was released on a different label — and Roper’s own fallout with the music industry appear on the last disc.
In “Mercenary,” the album’s second track and its first single, Roper is a bruised boxer remembering his final bout:
I was the future
In ninteteen-ninety-five
I watched the flashbulbs burst
Whenever I’d arrive.
I’d tape my knuckles up
Cinched and tight for the ring
Just beneath the gloves
Clenching white for the swing
I was a sellout
Before a sellout crowd
I threw the fight in my head
Before the fat lady bowed
You want a tip-off,
Some good advice for the brawl?
Just wear a mouth-guard
To keep your teeth when you fall.
And when you quit
Make sure that you can wash your hands of it.
The fifth track, “When You Burn Too Fast,” is likely another swipe at the music promoters and record executives with who Roper has feuded. The talented singer-songwriter seemingly alludes to his music’s commercial failures — Five Iron Frenzy split up largely due to financial strain, and his namesake band Roper dissolved after releasing its debut album:
Oh, you’ll pay it in blood
That kerosene fuels the evil flame
Where they’ve forgotten your name
And you’ll never last
And you’ll die very young
When you burn too fast.
Brave Saint Saturn experiments with a variety of musical styles, abandoning the traditional verse-chorus-bridge construction on several songs. Electronic flourishes add to the group’s space theme, but the solid bass and drum backbone, searing guitar riffs and Roper’s stratospheric strains propel the album into orbit.
Culp, a fellow Five Iron Frenzy veteran, takes sole songwriting credits and sings lead vocals on four tracks. His lyrics are descriptive and add a stark realism to the album, though his tinny, still voice can’t convey the passion of Roper’s bold bellows and shattering shrieks.
It’s entirely fitting that the first track opens with four lines of a Dylan Thomas poem. Roper is matchless in his lyrical eloquence, and his artful authorship shines through on “Fortress of Solitude,” which uses Superman as its protagonist:
I am the ghost
Of haunting hope
A trailing phantom
Some withering wisp of smoke
Slipping by
And these are my words
Flung through the sky
Trailing red like a cape
Longing to fly
On this, their thirteenth try
This prison of mine
Is to carry alone
The light of one red sun
Beneath my skin
And never, ever go home
To watch the ravens fly
So very far, far away.
Though he’s toured with praise bands and performed for largely conservative crowds, Roper’s commitment to social justice evidences a cerebral Christianity that falls well outside the fundamentalist sphere. He scolds the United States for materialism and the slaughter of Native Americans on two Five Iron Frenzy tunes, and on Anti-Meridian’s 12th track, “Blessed Are the Landmines,” he sarcastically skewers the hawks who preach holy war from American pulpits:
Blessed are the landmines
Stretched across the desert floor
God, bless the hands that formed them
Filled their shrapnel hearts with war
May you bless the companies
The goose that laid the golden egg
May they make a million more
Blowing off a million legs.
Blessed are the black-tongued ravens
Substituting fear for reason:
“To hate war is to hate us
If you love peace, then you must love treason”
Beat your plowshares into swords
Beat your pulpits, turn your tables
Blessed are the hand grenades
Bless the church who rattles sabers.
Roper is an emotive songsmith who can rocket from despondent to manic in a single stanza. His throaty yelps convey dejection in “When You Burn Too Fast,” and “Fortress of Solitude,” but take on hopeful tones in “Through Depths of Twilight,” “Always Just Beneath the Dawn” and “Invictus.”
After a severe malfunction results in a three-year geosynchronous orbit around Saturn’s moon, Titan, one of the mission’s original astronauts dies while engaging the escape capsule. The sacrifice prompts a scientific discovery that proves legendary. The USS Gloria crew is rescued by the Russian spacecraft Invictus — after which the closing track is named, and the two shuttles return to their home planet.
It’s at least a carefully spun redemption parable in the lingo of science fiction and at most an analogy for the band’s own musical career. Gloria failed its ultimate mission but achieved worldwide renown for the discovery of an anti-matter energy source. Brave Saint Saturn hasn’t landed a single on the chalky and alien terrain of the Billboard charts, yet, the band’s lyricisim and gravity-defying energy constitute a triumph.
In the next-to-last song, “These Frail Hands,” Roper describes deliverance from even the bleakest of scenes:
When the concrete of the world
Becomes too cumbersome to lift
And the cataracts of fear and doubt
Cloak truth beyond what we can sift
And darkness, darkness bleeds its way
When crippling anguish clouds our sight
The ghosts of dusk have bared their teeth
Set their claws to bring the night
Hold on, hold tight
Darkness can’t perceive the light
Though lightlessness has chilled us numb
And though its wings may cloud the skies
The dark shall never overcome.
The trilogy’s first installment, “So Far From Home,” was released on 5 Minute Walk Records, while Tooth & Nail backed BS2’s sophomore effort after an apparent falling out between Roper and 5 Minute Walk boss Frank Tate. With no financial backing, the clever cosmonauts completed the Saturn 5 trilogy through sheer force of will, releasing “Anti-Meridian” on an independent label branded Department of Biophysics.
Roper and his wife, Amy, mailed the more than 1,000 “Anti-Meridian” preorders from the couple’s Denver, Colo. home, printing the shipping labels from a standard home printer. Most orders were shipped long after the album’s official Sept. 15 release date — my copy, No. 1,492, showed up in the mailbox Monday.
Fans have been understanding if not patient, and though the third and final installment in the Saturn 5 trilogy has been written, the music remains recorded, catalogued and vacuum sealed like any unearthly curiosity, a jagged shard from the universe’s distant depths, patiently awaiting your discovery.
1 Comment
October 11, 2008 at 6:39 am
This Album is so amazing. I was the first one to pre-order the album. (Reese Roper wrote me a note about it on my reciept) Check out my newest blog about the album!!!