The Secession Movement: Akedemic

Trying to place New Jersey’s the Secession Movement into some sort of table or chart for comparison against other groups is pointless. Call this stuff what you want, be it math rock, emocore, postmodern noise, or just plane Jane alternative. There’s a little of all this in the band’s music, so it’s safe to say these guys are in their own world when it comes to making music.

Having read a bit about this band when acquiring this disc and reading all the praise it got, I was inclined to think this was going to be something smashing right out of the box. It isn’t. In fact, it takes a whole lot of getting used to. This is one of those albums that screams at you to play it a few times, because if commercial accessibility is what you’re looking for, then you’ve come to the wrong place. However, if you stick around and really listen to the songs on this album, you’re bound to find a lot of surprises that do include a lot of hooks and melodies that upon first glance do not exist at all.

And to say that a group like this is bad because of such a fact is to completely not hear the music. Yes, it’s loud at times. Yes, it goes on rather cacophonous directions at times. And yes, the vocals aren’t always the kinds of things you’d say were “pleasant”. Yet the Secession Movement are incredibly skilled at their craft, eschewing everything you think you know about what makes a great album and following their own rules.

The band features Timothy Day on guitar, David Downham on guitar and vocals, David Dworanczyk on drums, and Nicholas Kessler on bass. The twin guitars in this band do a lot of the talking. Listen to them rage on and then turn on a dime and start trickling out in an eerie fashion all within the same bar of music. They thrash, they caress, and they do everything guitars can do. Often in a barrage of sound, and that’s exactly where you must put your expectations away and just let the music play.

The first track, “Aren’t We Revolving, We Are Revolving, Aren’t We?” sounds like nothing more than a mad blast of noise. Yes, I can sense your fingers ready to hit that stop button much like mine was when I first played this album. Even though the song does have its soft moments, the full-on assault exacted by the band doesn’t make those moments feel so warm. But wait until the second song, “Dazzling Freud with Finger Exercises” as the Secession Movement spews out its very own brand of power pop, complete with vocal harmonies, punched up guitars, and the rhythm section going absolutely nuts. It’s over in less than three minutes and it will leave you feeling like you got socked in the gut, but in a good way.

“The ‘A’ Parade” explodes all over the place in its first half, and then calms down into this weird funky space jazz kind of music that starts peeling away the rough rock overtones and exposes the other side of the Secession Movement. Those quieter moments are further excavated in the instrumental “Single File Line”. Is this a completely different band? No, just one that can play it both hard and fast and slow and pretty, both with equal success.

From there, it’s everybody’s album featuring furiously nasty trash rock (“Long Story”), weird funk excursions (“Doctor Please”), tightly wound delicate thrash odes (“Gone On A Notion”), and another instrumental (“A Fire Drill”). It ends on the pensive “Since You’ve Been Impressed” that does the alternating quiet passages / loud rock assault formula. Yet it still works by album’s end.

If there’s one complaint to be had, it’s that the vocals are buried a little too much in the mix at times. You do get a lyric sheet to go along with the songs, but still it would have been nice had the words been just as loud as the guitars at times. Not a big qualm, but one worth noting. Other than that, Academic is indeed quite the great album that others have claimed it was. It’s certainly not going to be for everyone, but those with adventurous tastes will certainly find a lot to enjoy and indulges themselves in here.