“Don’t look down / There is nowhere to run,” screams Chris Spencer during the downer noise-rock assault of Reform.
Behind the caginess of Human Impact’s excellent new album, Gone Dark, there’s also a stark acknowledgement that hope is on the wane. Not ones to spew from the sewers of social media about it, instead Human Impact breach the studio vaults to make their mark an indelible one.
Spencer, also of Unsane, and Cop Shoot Cop’s Jim Coleman are joined by bassist Eric Cooper (Made Out of Babies, Bad Powers) and drummer Jon Syverson (Daughters), the rhythm section replacing Chris Pravdica and Phil Puleo this time around. And with the seeds of Gone Dark being planted during the 2020 COVID lockdown in the East Texas woods, the new manifestation of Human Impact would eventually convene with co-producer Andrew Schneider (Ken Mode, Cave In) at Austin’s Cedar Creek Studio.
While the song titles will tell you a lot about Gone Dark, Human Impact are rightly pissed off. “I make a conscious effort to try to think of things in terms of ‘we’ and ‘us’ and what’s happening to us as a whole instead of just my stupid problems,” said Spencer in the album press release.
It’s this framing of the collective angst that is far more powerful than your usual woe is me bullshit via a drunken Friday night Facebook rant from someone with too much time on their hands. Building on their self-titled debut LP and surprise release, EP01, Human Impact’s missives are razor-sharp, with a dead-eye directness that recalls the same dystopian nightmares Philip K. Dick predicted so many years ago.
Collapse sets with scene, careering into the bowels of the abyss. It’s Human Impact delivering something likened to a distortion version of another sci-fi figurehead: William Gibson. “I’d suddenly collapse / Nothing we do can come back,” barks Spencer, not riding against nihilism but finding comfort in it.
Human Impact - Gone DarkOn Hold On and Disconnect, Human Impact straddle the orbits with the kind of sci-fi blackscapes that bore through like laser beams. The dissonant echoes of Shellac and later-era undulations of Killing Joke playing out with lethal precision. Meanwhile, Destroy Rebuild is Human Impact’s ultimate ‘question everything’ moment. Hooping post-punk oozing with the kind of dub-infused dread that pulls from the same vortex of Kevin Martin’s latest release as The Bug, Machine (“A place where corruption and fear coexist”). And the only thing to do is kick against it.
So too with Imperative, where Spencer and Coleman form a picket line alongside their fellow blue-collar brethren. With a line like, “We got lost / Broken industry / Not much thought / Sudden atrophy“, it’s a song where you can almost smell the grease and sweat permeating from the workshop floor. And the grime bleeds into the metallic surge of Corrupted. Buzzsaw post-punk delivered with bare-chested rage. (“There’s a place underground/ Follow the sound / The future is now”)”.
As the inflections of sci-fi form the vital foundations to Gone Dark, perhaps the most telling moment comes from Reform, as Spencer spits the line, “This environment’s out of control / Watch the fires from space”. It’s a moment where there’s a hint that things have gone beyond the point of return. Even resistance and the psyche of collectivism has its limits, and with a passage like the one above, perhaps Human Impact have exposed the biggest unspoken truth of all: we live in a world that is beyond repair.
In the midst of being crippled by capitalism and using every last physical fibre to try and push against it, it’s this backs-to-the-wall remit that sees Human Impact reveal their true core. Underlining the world’s ills in the same vein as punk comrades Tension Span and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, it’s this resistance of sound that is a refuge from reality. It’s true, we need more bands like Human Impact, but with the very systems they are kicking against, the voices in this space are dwindling at a rapid rate. In many ways, it makes statements like Gone Dark all the more important.
Gone Dark is out now via Ipecac Recordings. Purchase from Bandcamp.
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