Universal Order of Armageddon - "Stepping Softly Into"
Ian told me a story about working the door at DC Space the summer of 1994. Places like that always intend to have a rubber stamp so they can mark people's hands as they paid, but somehow it's always missing, or too smudgy, or the ink pad ran dry. So Ian and the other volunteer used a marker instead, at first putting an X like we're all used to, but as they day went on and boredom grew they started drawing elaborate scenes up and down people's arms. The singer of Universal Order of Armageddon came in as the silliness reached a peak and very politely asked if they could refrain from drawing all over him, that he was worried about the chemicals in the marker ink. In they end, they offered to let him in without even the compulsory X, saying, "oh we can remember you."
I believed it, letting his sharp words rattle around my brain: "This your industry/I will not let inside me/NO." They made perfect sense coming from a person who'd be clear eyed about Xylene the same way he'd repel any other toxin in his atmosphere. I loved the song they were from, "Visible Distance," how it opened with unaccompanied drums. It was melodic, jarring and fearsome, it sounds like the hardest a snare had ever been hit. And then the guitar reached these alien frequencies, so much precision and dexterity, but also a prickling clamminess that I'd never really heard before. It's such a rager, so focused. But in a way, what it does best is set up a dynamic to be undermined by the last song on that side of the record, "Stepping Softly Into."
That song's opening words were a refusal: "You broadcast/what it is to be a man." The line repeats five times in the song, and every repeat hits the same extreme of defiance. A couple times through he repeats the word "man" after pushing through the phrase, his distaste contagious. The rest of the band follows his energy, hammering twice, all at once, and then pulling all the way back into silence. The song is consistently dour, weighted so heavily, led by this seesaw two note guitar part. There are occasional moments of momentous rage but it's gone after mere seconds, shoving listeners back into that stark, two note clarity. You could imagine frustrated audiences, breathless as the restraint holds them hostage, finally unleashed as the whole band joins in, only to vanish after the count of five. Next to the propulsion of a song like "Visible Distance" it must feel a bullying.
Ian and I saw Universal Order of Armageddon a few months after he told me that story. A friend's parent had moved and the old house was still vacant so we were sleeping on the floor of an empty, unheated Maryland home. It was November and in my memory I was sick all the time. I carried around an entire box of tissues for the entire of this show, snot and tears constantly pouring down my face. I remember laying down between bands. It was one of the most fun, impactful shows I can remember ever seeing.
I taped the show on a walkman with a microphone pinned to my shirt, and I've gone back to the tape regularly over the years. On the records, the songs are so distinct and crystalline, so I was struck how they threaded them all together live, the drums for "Visible Distance" starting immediately at the end of "Switch is Down." So much momentum and power! The locomotive punch of "Benedict" is especially forceful here, played a touch faster than on the record, yet never losing control. But my strongest memories from that show aren't captured on the tape. One is the moment when Tonie Joy breaks his guitar and looks up to see if the other bands will lend him one. It felt like everyone just shrunk back into the crowd, all momentarily afraid to trust him with their instrument after seeing what he'd just done with his. The other is the singer's bearing, the way he twisted himself around the mic stand while the whole band stormed around him. Like a sailor clinging to the mast mid-squall. I never saw anyone look so frail and defiant at the same time.
You can see on the tape where I tried to write out the set list. Probably I only had "The Switch is Down" 12" at that point since I didn't recognize any of their other songs. You'll notice they didn't play "Stepping Softly Into."
The second time I saw Universal Order of Armageddon was in 2010. There are some good photos from the show HERE. They did play "Stepping Softly Into" and it was great! But felt weird too. In the 16 years between the two shows, the singer of U.O.A. covered both his arms in tattoos, shaved his head, and got very visibly, physically strong. All the snarl remained, but I was uneasy at him shouting out, "what it is to be a man." He looked so much like a man, like an archetype of a man. I don't know anything about what he'd been up to in the intervening years (though I do really like that Uniform record) and it's unfair for me to make any guesses about where his head is at singing those lyrics. But the clenched fist of 2010 looked really different than the clenched fist of 1994, and I was wary of it.
This difference troubled me for awhile. I got thinking about those 90s Morrissey records where he's obsessed with boxing, how it became a proxy for a kind of stoic masculinity ("Losing in front of your home crowd/You wish the ground would open up and take you down/And will time ever pass?/Will time/ever pass/for us"). What happened to the 19 year old Morrissey who wrote in a letter, "Society is sick and the world is in a mess thanks to men." It struck me that 16 years had passed for Morrissey between that observation and the release of the song "Boxers." What did this say about the inevitability of a turn towards masculinity for dudes that wouldn't have dreamed of it when they were younger?
But again this conjecture isn't helpful or reasonable, and blurs the questions I really want to answer. I got thinking again about that show in 1994, the kids who saw my box of tissue and asked for a few so they could plug their ears after Brooks Headley sat down at his drums and banged through the toms. They could guess how loud this band was going to be. But also that they knew I would say yes, that we'd have a shared moment that would resonate again when the band was done playing and we stood there, ears ringing, shaking our heads. I remembered the guy selling records ("7"s are $3 each or 2 for $5") suggesting I go get Ethiopian food after the show, that spicy food would clean up my congestion and there were a ton of vegan options right around the corner. I thought about the kids working the door offering to remember someone's face so they didn't have to get marker on their hand. In that context, there was endless opportunity to ask a singer what they meant by "What it is to be a man." It would've been ordinary, and would've also been easy. The 2010 show was at a D.I.Y. space in Brooklyn, so not such a different context, but the "event-ness" of this reunion show, the pent-up anticipation meant the band wasn't going to be at hand in the same way, and the dynamics between people had shifted. I am willing to concede I am romanticizing. But the more I think about it, it wasn't the lyric or the delivery that was different between those two shows, 16 years apart. What was different was the depth of opacity and the potential for scratching away at it. And I think it could've been there, but I know that community is something you have to build, and you can't just recall from some other moment when it was there in your life. Even if it was all you had at that time.
Anyway, I've digitized the U.O.A. tape I made, now 25 years old. If you're interested, you can download it HERE
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