“Remake the Skies”: The Relentless Celestial Optimism of Misery Signals’ ‘The Tempest’
“Per aspera ad astra.
(Through hardships to the stars.)”
According to Carl Sagan, the famed American astronomer, astrophysicist, and popular science presenter:
“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
Writing in Cosmos (1980), the popular science book developed and released as a literary complement to the highly-influential television documentary series of the same name, Sagan describes the intrinsic connection between humanity, biological life, and limitless bounds of space:
Think of the Sun’s heat on your upturned face on a cloudless summer’s day; think how dangerous it is to gaze at the Sun directly. From 150 million kilometres away, we recognize its power. What would we feel on its seething self-luminous surface, or immersed in its heat of nuclear fire? The sun warms us and feeds us and permits us to see. It fecundated the Earth. It is powerful beyond human experience. Birds greet the sunrise with an audible ecstasy. Even some one-celled organisms know to swim to the light. Our ancestors worshiped the Sun, and they were far from foolish. And yet the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star. If we must worship a power greater than ourselves, does it not make sense to revere the Sun and stars? (198–99)
And it’s this sense of reverence and awe, akin to drawing your fingers across the sublime surface of the night sky, that’s evoked when listening to ‘The Tempest’: the long-awaited pre-release single from influential progressive metalcore act Misery Signals.
The hard-hitting track parallels the journey of a troubled stargazer, who yearns to break free from the shackles of urban life and modernity by venturing out into a restless and vibrant wilderness. As the song cascades with poly-rhythmic heaviness and bright melodic passages, the experiential feeling is one of profound optimism and unyielding possibility, of finding the darkness and the light in every moment.
After a seven-year absence between albums, Misery Signals finally return with the release of Ultraviolet on August 7th, their fifth full-length album and first with founding vocalist Jesse Zaraska since their landmark 2004 debut, Of Malice and the Magnum Heart.
“‘The Tempest’ feels like a concentrated dose of Misery Signals. I love that it crashes through with all this energy, with very little indulging. That type of songwriting economy was in my mind across this whole album,” says lead guitarist Ryan Morgan. “It’s interesting to hear a little bit of restraint work to actually make everything bigger.”
With Ultraviolet marking the return of the group’s founding members, including Branden Morgan (drums), Stu Ross (guitar) and Kyle Johnson (bass), ‘The Tempest’ is evidence that the band’s indelible sonic impact remains firmly intact, reinvigorated by the passage of time and bolstered by a newfound resolve. Morgan adds:
“People will hear the record and there won’t be any need for decoding the emotional content. ‘Sunlifter’ was the first song we wrote for the record and it set the tone thematically for the lyrics on the album, which came to be about ambition and striving and all the parts of ourselves that are in contradiction with each other.”
Speaking on the album’s lyrical focus, Zaraska describes Ultraviolet as having a greater emphasis on hope and well-being than the groups’ previous records:
“I tried to create a Misery Signals record that was lyrically more positive than the previous outings, something that I could get behind as a father. Though there still exists a fair amount of tension and darkness, there shines a great amount more light.”
Ultimately, the call to action in ‘The Tempest’ is one of resilience, through inner strength, personal growth and universal purpose.
“Nurture those starry eyes, old friend/
For this is not your time.
Mend those broken wings, and reset/
We will make this right.
We must let our imaginations run wild. Staring at our world, one bathed in the radiant glow of technological progress, we see the warmth of artificial light and the products of human hands all around us. Yet still, the questions linger.
What would it feel like to harness the power of the gods? To hold a star in our hands, to feel that immense, roiling, unceasing power. Something unfathomably destructive. Cosmic forces that both give and sustain life.
Ride the wind and chase the sun/
And fly amidst the stars once more.
Hold on, hold on, I know that you can fight.”
But we’re only human. Only mortal. Only water, bones and meat. We cannot fight the mighty allure of gravity. The star, the light, the heat — the sheer iridescent brilliance of it all — will inevitably consume us. Completely and utterly. Enveloping and devouring us, reducing our mind and body to a starburst of constituents parts, nothing more than a cloud of atoms and fundamental particles. The seeds of the stars once more.
The might of this cosmic strength should scare us and drive us. Both as a firm warning of our entropic inevitability, and as the smallest glimmer of a luminous hope that springs eternal.
“Ride the wind and fly amidst the constellations/
Hold on, hold on and overcome the night.
Rise up, my friend.
From ashes rise to again, shine/
Reach for the sky, reach for the sky”
We turn our heads and gaze upon those flashing beacons of light, those winking nuclear furnaces adrift in the black abyss of night. Nothing but the long dead photographs of a vast, ageing, and indifferent cosmos.
We yearn to return to the stars, to “remake the skies” with our story. And maybe someday, we will.
“When the world becomes so black/
We must sculpt the night and remake the skies.”
As Sagan — that tireless champion of reason, scientific inquiry, and relentless celestial optimism — proclaims: “We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos.” But for now, that promise remains merely a hope for us to grasp in our fragile hands.
Works Cited
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. 1980. Random House, pp. 198–99.
