“Glass in the Trees” by Dead Poetic, Saturday, October 30, 2021

Solid State Records released Dead Poetic's debut album, Four Wall Blackmail with producers Barry Poynter and Jason Magnussen. The songs on FWB were rough. Poynter worked with Zao, Living Sacrifice, Embodyment, and Haste the Day to make some seriously heavy music. And with fresh, young signees with a hardcore name based on the 1989 Robin Williams classic, grungy screaming with intermittent singing worked in a certain scene of Christian Rock at that time. The problem was that none of the melodies were particularly catchy. The band turned to Aaron Sprinkle to produce their sophomore record, New Medicines. Sprinkle's production transformed the band into one that listeners could sing along to. Rather than singing with intermittent screaming, New Medicines was the opposite. New Medicines was supposed to be the start of another Tooth & Nail success story. Yet, today, the band's three studio records are hardly remembered because of lead singer Brandon Rike's decision to walk away from music.

I CAN STILL FEEL THE FRIGHT THAT NIGHT BRINGS. Formed in Junior High under the name "Self-Minded" and discovered by Solid State's A&R at Cornerstone when the bandmates were still in high school, the band that became Dead Poetic hailed from the small town of Dayton, Ohio. The young men of the band were dead-serious about their mission as an evangelical band, often holding altar calls at their early shows as they toured churches across America with other Christian metal and post-hardcore bands. The band had formed at a local church in Dayton, and had gotten their message after losing several friends over the years to "small-town boredom," as Rike tells Matt Carter in Dead Poetic's episode of Labeled. Rike never defines what this boredom was back then, but he does say that bored small towns today have meth problems. The first tragedy Rike talks about is his friend's older brother was killed in a car crash. "Every year it seems like someone died," Rike says. "It gets a little hard to joke around after this stuff happens. At the time we thought Jesus is the answer to this pain, and that was what we sang about." "Glass in the Trees" is a visceral portrait of hearing the news about a shocking death. The songwriting feels in the moment, even though the band had been processing all of this tragedy on their first record. Maybe the difference was that on the first record the tragedy was too raw to be organized into a descriptive song. Also, the band's first album seems to spiritualize before describing, a no-no for any poet, living or dead.

AND STANDING AT YOUR GRAVE, I COULD HAVE CAUSED THIS. My elementary school was next to the high school, and I remember when I was in second grade, one day my teacher told the class that there would be a realistic, staged car accident in the school parking lot. Before seeing this demonstration, we had watched videos about drunk driving and drugs. I remember the D.A.R.E. program was reminding us not to drink and not to use drugs from kindergarten or first grade. They told us not to accept a ride with parents or older siblings who haven been drinking or taking drugs. The day of the staged accident, my teacher told us that the production was for the high school students, though elementary students would watch the event from a greater distance, probably to shield us a bit from the realistic blood. If memory serves me, one of the high school students actually performed in the demonstration as the drunk driver. The high school students were brought outside to watch...something, only for an out of control car to crash into a telephone pole. A teacher, goes to perform CPR on the driver and the police EMTs show up quicker than usual. The high school students stand in utter terror as it's revealed that the driver is one of their classmates, and he is pronounced dead on the scene. Of course, the tragedy doesn't go on much longer. A police officer speaks into a megaphone that this was only a demonstration. The classmate stands up, with his fake blood and crash-accident make-up and tattered clothes. We're all reminded that drunk driving kills, whether you're the one drinking, you're in the car, or you're on the road with other drunk drivers. This demonstration reminds us that at anytime, someone we love can be taken from us. Fortunately, my sheltered high school experience saw no deaths to drunk driving or anything else. But the horror the high school students must have felt on that day, seeing a classmate on a stretcher with a sheet put over his head, may have scared some kids into not drunk driving. Dead Poetic's "Glass in the Trees" is another example of that message. And the band preached it for the length of their short-career. 

 

Read “Glass In The Trees” by Dead Poetic on Genius.