"Counterfeit" Wolves at the Gate, Wednesday, January 20, 2021


In 2019, I rediscovered Wolves At the Gate band from the Labeled podcast. Labeled is a podcast about the history of Tooth & Nail and Solid State Records. As I get older, my tolerance for hard music is decreasing. Of course, when I was a teenager Post-Hardcore was king. Everyone used screaming in their music, but musical genres started to become more defined c. 2006 and there was hardcore and rock. And a lot of rock went more electronic and pop. Still, even after the murky time, hardcore bands still liked to take a break from screaming and sing a ballad. When I picked up this record, though, I found less screaming and more of the type of music I liked before the rock/hardcore split. This group sounds more like New Medicines era Dead Poetic than Define the Great Line era Underoath. This album made me miss intense rock. Guitars and bass and drums and passionate singing spiced with some well-intentioned screaming. 

YOU WON'T MAKE ME INTO YOUR PAWN. "Counterfeit" was the fourth single released prior to the band's July 26, 2019 release of the album Eclipse. Lead singer Stephen Cobbuci called "Counterfeit" "a fight song" and "a song of rebellion." He goes on to say, "Countless lies and deceptions are thrown at us every day from the news media, politicians, people who abuse religion, social media, and even our own minds. I wanted to write a simple song that could be one of rebellion to be sung whenever we hear these lies." Living in an eventful time with "fake news" and constant political polarization, it's hard to remember exactly what Cobbuci could have been reacting to. To me, the lyrics seem to be plainly calling out church systems that turn ungodly heroes into idols. Pastors use fear to manipulate congregants to vote and support systems that are clearly ungodly, and they have to use trickery to make the ungodly action the lesser of two evils. Anyone outside of the system can call out the hypocrisy, but many on the inside are brainwashed.  

INFLICT THE YOUTH WITH THE LIES YOU'VE WOVEN. t seems that Christianity is constantly highjacked from the teachings of Jesus. Whether it's Kenneth Copeland cyphering money to buy another jet, Mark Driscoll creating an environment of toxic masculinity and toxic church culture, the swinging and cuckold lifestyle of Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his university's policies that oppress LGBT students, or the evangelical political endorsements of Trump. Who makes the mega-church pastor a judge of what is or isn't Christian? There certainly is a lot of source material to inspire this song. It seems like every week another #preachernsneakers is taken down. What's most upsetting is the marriage between politics and religion. Franklin Graham has no right to call the House Republicans a shame when the biggest shame is that Franklin Graham got so involved in politics in the first place. It seems we are living in an era anticipating the fall of the "righteous." 


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