The Creative Urge and Devil’s Work: Breaking Chains with Aversed (Video)
by Jody Jenkins
It’s no secret that artists’ issues fuel their creativity. But what about when an artist’s issue is their art?
Sitting in the summer heat on the terrace of Essalon Café not long ago, I was talking to Sungwoo Jeong about his metal band, Aversed. They’d played at Amherst Media the day before for Live At the Grid and you couldn’t help but be impressed by their skill, discipline and pretty raw talent. They arrived at 11 am after playing a gig at the 13th Floor Lounge in Florence till the wee hours of the morning and were focused and ready to go.
At one point while we were eating, Sungwoo made an offhanded comment about his parents hating his music and forbidding him to play it. I laughed it off as sarcasm, but he pressed the point.
“They absolutely forbid it,” he insisted. “They think it’s the devil’s music. They don’t know I do it. It’s against their wishes.” Korean, conservative, Christian, traditional were the terms he used.
It’s no secret that artists’ issues fuel their creativity. But what about when an artist’s issue is their art?
That’s what Aversed’s first album “Renewal,” released in 2016, is all about. Illustrated with a post-apocalyptic urban landscape scattered with gravestones, the album explores the idea of redemption for the things we do surreptitiously because we have no other choice. He wrote it to exorcise his demons … and in the hopes of helping others find their way through similar dilemmas.
When you listen closely to the title track, you get the sense of a titanic struggle unfolding amid the spiraling guitar riffs and operatic vocals and the driving, multi-tempoed speed metal. Alternating between ominous lower-world menace and soaring liberation, the music ultimately flows down into expanding pools of release and redemption — perhaps renewal is the word — evoking the realization that anger and self denial in the quest to please others is untenable, and that peace comes only from self-acceptance.
from “Renewal”
Searching myself, I start to see through childlike perceptions. We hide ourselves from our own reality. Longing to find a sense of true self. This is who I am; no compromise shall be met.
There is no more self-betrayal, unresponsive anguish. Life’s too short to let this wash away. Years have turned to waste, these self-inflicted wounds. Seeks renewal of a new life found ahead.Time to forget all the pain suppressed. Our fire will not burn out.
When singer Haydee Irizarry death-rattle screams the lyrics This is my life, there is no compromise, This is my life, There is no compromise, the music drops into a jackboot march reminiscent of the opening in Led Zepplin’s “Kashmir.” Irizarry’s coarse, parched vocals retch a pure primal scream of existence and a recognition of the simple notion that we are who we are. And the beautiful, aria-like verses that follow give a sense of soaring release. The tension between these two ideas and the hard driving guitars, the roiling musical vertigo of self-doubt and anguish that gives way to acceptance creates an emotional journey that makes Aversed hard to shake.
I asked Sungwoo if he thought tension between his parents and his passion might be what fueled his drive to succeed. Without hesitation he said he was certain of it. Born in Seoul, he moved with his family to the Boston area when he was five. When he talks about growing up in a traditional Korean house, the strictures are striking, reminiscent, for me at least, of growing up in the South: The religion. The rigors of ritual and tradition in which respect for elders is key. Which means that for him, the mere existence of the band is potentially apocalyptic: He formed the band in 2010 and they are gaining in popularity. They were chosen to play at Chicago Open Air this past summer along with Ozzy Osbourne and were interviewed by Spin magazine. All this notoriety without his parents’ knowledge or consent seems both ironic and potentially devastating.
In June Sungwoo took the oath as a US Citizen and he said he’s proud to be American, but he feels like he’s living on the fault line somewhere between two identities, both as a citizen and as a son. He talked about how he would love to share what he cares about most with the people he loves most. And there’s no doubt that real redemption would come through the validation success would bring. He believes it would give him something he could bring to his parents in the hopes of making them proud. But there’s no guarantee they would accept what he has done.
Aside from the inner conflict that drives Aversed, drummer Jeff Saltzman powers this monster truck of a sound, lurking everywhere, even beneath the often placid surfaces of Irizarry’s vocals. Alden Marchand’s broad guitar sweeps are breathtaking and seamless and Martin Epstein has to be the hardest working bassist around. After the Live At The Grid show, I downloaded the tracks and isolated his six string to just listen to the two-handed fretwork.
Singer Haydee Irizarry, who shared the lyrical writing on “Renewal,” said though her story differed from Sungwoo’s, she carries a similar sorrow and passion which is why the themes resonate with her. “As a whole, ‘Renewal’ is an empowering album to perform,” she said. “It puts you in a position of awareness and power as you confront all of the negative forces by saying “This is my life …” She said that though the audience may not hear every word of her singing, especially the gutturals, “the visual and instrumental parts of our live performance are very expressive of our passions and artistic intentions.”
It’s hard to hear this band and not come away with an appreciation of the complex, finely tuned, almost symphonic elements that go into it. Together they take you on a musical and emotional journey well worth the ride.
Aversed bills itself as weaving “a hybrid of brutality and elegance.” It succeeds and in the end, achieves something powerful. If all this amounts to the devil’s work, then we have to stop to reconsider what beauty the demon hath wrought.
Jody Jenkins is a writer and filmmaker living in Northampton. He is Director of Field Production for Amherst Media and Editor of The Collective.
