Die, Robot
Ten years later, CUAD’s best album still carries dark portent
By Jarret Keene
We! Are! All! Dead! screams Curl Up and Die’s Mike Minnick over an angular guitar pattern and kick-drum/splash hits. These explosive, nearly indecipherable words comprise the first four tracks of the band’s Revelation Records debut Unfortunately We’re Not Robots. Having moved to Vegas just weeks before 9/11, I felt Minnick’s statement slam into my spine like a devastating prophecy. Ten years later, the album’s prognostic qualities are readily apparent.
In 2002, Robots served as the angry, darkly humorous soundtrack to my life as a writer and part-time professor. I’d exchanged the death-metal swampland of Florida for the parched hardcore environs of Las Vegas, where everything was stripped of meaning and reduced to the image of an oxygen-masked, chain-smoking, octogenarian Republican wanking a slot-machine lever as a way of dissolving his retirement savings. People in caves had just brought down a U.S. financial symbol with box cutters and 747s. I’d heard tales that Curl Up and Die (1998-2005) had cut its teeth playing desert cave shows with generators. The band’s music impressed me enough to think it could flatten buildings, entire cities.
Upon hearing Robots for the first time in 2002 in touring CUAD guitarist Shay Merhdad’s car (“I’m thinking about joining these guys,” Mehrdad said to me. “What do you think?”) CUAD demolished the carefully constructed architecture of critical smugness I’d built around me. Indeed, more than any other aggressive band, CUAD killed my taste for indie-rock. The band helped me locate my testicles again. After Robots, it boggled my mind to think college-educated hipsters gave a shit about The Strokes—ugh, those tinny guitars, whiney vocals and cardboard-thin drums nauseated me. These were life-and-death times! Where was the musical response? Well, there was a response, albeit generated by blue-collar 20-year-old Vegas kids who lacked degrees, trust funds. They worked as photo-lab rats, couriers, dog walkers. Sure, they borrowed their name from a once-trendy, now-defunct salon across from a too-cool record store on Maryland Parkway; that’s all the use they had for hipsters. Needless to say, Pitchfork gave nary a turdlet about CUAD.
I loved the music, its artful savagery, its brainy brawn, so much I put the band on the cover of Las Vegas CityLife. I looked for any excuse to write about CUAD. I had a raging hard-on. My boner hasn’t waned; it has waxed in the decade since Robot’s May 7 release. I spun the disc recently. It sounds better, strikes harder than ever.
And it’s definitely prophetic.
Robots was expertly recorded in Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou’s Godcity Studios in November of 2001, the psychic wounds of a so-called terrorist attack still profusely bleeding across the collective Western imperial imagination, and it’s among Ballou’s earliest and best engineering jobs. CUAD probably didn’t give a shit about psychic or imperial anything, but they knew enough to acknowledge pain and confusion and identify its source. (Is it any wonder the “screamo” genre emerged and spread wildfire-like in the years after the WTC attack?) The source? Man’s misplaced faith in technology.
The moment when accelerating, industrial-percussion kicks in during “Doctor Doom, a Man of Science, Doesn’t Believe in Jesus, Why the Fuck Do You” is a highlight. Hearing it now, I find new associations. For example, today’s war between conceited atheists and dumb Christians results in book and movie sales, while real gore, under the banner of the U.S.A., gushes in the Middle East. Separating the battered from the dead, screams Minnick, clearly indifferent to talking about science or the savior. Close enough to kiss the tears from your face as I lie beaten and unable to stand. He could be describing two comic-book characters pummeling each other, or he could be articulating a lack of faith in the shibboleths of God and man. On one level, the title is meaningless; on another, it means everything.
CUAD’s album was intended for hardcore kids. But the record’s themes are suited for older lost souls, especially a thirtysomething writer trying to sort out this virtual bullshit called the Internet while struggling to figure out if he should waste a second thinking about politics, economics or God. Images of run-amok, science-humping, brain-damaged mechanized animals litter Minnick’s song titles: “Ted Nugent Goes AOL.” “I Lost My Job To a Machine.” “Make Like a Computer and Get With the Program.” They read like headlines ripped from an apocalyptic newspaper. Save for the AOL reference, that paper is being published now. The music erupts into murderous spasms like the industrial laundry press from Stephen King’s “The Mangler,” devouring the very people responsible for its upkeep as it no longer needs them. Technology makes everything easier, everyone smarter, except it doesn’t. It’s legalized addiction. Addicted to their own demise, journalists and artists make themselves obsolete by putting work online for free (including this writer). This is my last word, my love, screams Minnick. We will never meet again. Say goodbye to books, mix tapes, vinyl LPs, zines, anything you once cherished or could touch. Digitize it all, stuff it into a cloud. Disease turned this cloud into infinite light.
What robots don’t eat, they rule. And they’ll reign shortly, CUAD suggests, because computers are made by, nurtured by, morons. I hear the music mock today’s tech obsessions. Switched-off minds melt away in processed conversation, screams Minnick presaging the sound-alike humor and copycat coolness of social media. Staring as we are decaying. That’s right, strap on your iPad, soldier; time to hand over your little monkey mind to Apple, to Steve Jobs’ cyber-ghost. Update your Facistbook profile so mom and Uncle Sam know what you’re up to. Instagram the dish you charged on dad’s maxed-out credit card. Netflix-stream a superhero rom-com interracial buddy-cop fantasy. Eat more pr0n. Tweet a dick pic.
If there’s a soundtrack for the nightmare of drone wars, Robots is it. What machines don’t eat and rule, they bomb into the stone age. Obliterate the cave dwellers. Singed lips bleed softly from all to hell. There’s no fear in machinery. There’s no point in any of this. The breathtaking, crescendo-laden, cosmos-shattering groove of “You’d Be Cuter If I Shot You in the Face” is one of those rare epics—Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “East Hastings”—that transports the listener to the edge of madness, to the lip of the abyss, where all you can do is pray to your miserably invisible god that you don’t see the bottom. Laced with swathes of droning post-rock guitar and burbling electronic patches and acoustic-six-string arpeggios, the eight-minutes-in-length “Face” finally detonates in a devastating burst of horrifyingly processed vocal squeals that sound like a man being torn apart by what earlier New York crust-punk act Nausea called the Cybergod. The same voice later on becomes softer, an enslaved and asexual Japanese idoru in “Make Like a Computer.” Disturbing, haunting.
As the album dissipates to its ambient electronica, snare-rim-shotted conclusion “Rich Hall (Runner Up in a Carson Daly Lookalike Contest),” I think that CUAD’s is almost a sad story. In order to stay pure and not compromise, the band turned down lucrative-but-with-strings-attached deals from other labels bigger than Revelation. Over the years, I began to sense the band recognized that 80 percent of its fans were douchebags. Their final album, 2005’s The One Above All, The End Of All That Is, sounded purposefully written to keep mouth-breathers from doing their moshpit karate kicks. Initially the crowd had always been good, especially during shows at the old Balcony Lights record store. But by the end, CUAD shrugged at Vegas, not even bothering to play this city for their final show. The band had accomplished everything it set out to do: get signed by Revelation, record some incredible albums and EPs, and tour Europe.
What more could’ve been done? Turned into an Epitaph band like their still-not-wealthy heroes Converge? Or worse, commercialized their sound to the point that they might share bills with a mascara-ed, hair-ironed dipshit like Ronnie Radke? CUAD was all about defying expectations, which partly explains why everything they released after Robots wasn’t as satisfying. Robots didn’t strive as hard to defy anyone; it was just three guys—Minnick, guitarist Matt Fuchs (who played bass in the studio), drummer Jesse Fitts—making the most ear-damaging record possible. Eventually, in an effort to distance themselves from all the guitar-chugging hardcore that arrived in their influential wake CUAD made a record, The One Above All, that had more in common with Mogwai than Thrice. They could’ve been another Roadrunner chug band, but what artist in her right mind wants that?
For this reason alone, Robots stands as the purest CUAD release. There’s no self-consciousness or experimentation for its own sake. The band hadn’t begun to worry about numbskulls enjoying the music. CUAD only wanted to slay.
In my opinion, the band ended up doing more. Simply put, Robots is a visionary work that rewards repeated listens, a fractured mirror in which we catch glimpses of a dark and ruinous future. The End Of All That Is, ever was and ever will be.
***
Real steel: Frontman Mike Minnick reflects on CUAD’s metalcore masterpiece
“We were just getting into music,” Curl Up and Die frontman Mike Minnick, now 30, told me the other day during a phone chat. “We loved hardcore and started a band, and didn’t think of anything except writing music. We let our influences, like Earth Crisis, shine.
“We were just making songs, and we made mistakes on that album, but there’s tons of energy,” he continues. “More kids started coming to shows, and it’s true that hardcore got bigger, tougher, so we pushed back. In hindsight, it wasn’t smart.”
Minnick admits that, on CUAD’s final record, The End of All That Is, there was a song with a “breakdown” in it. They intentionally removed the section, because it was too typical of hardcore at the time.
“As we were ending, I was still interested in hardcore, but I didn’t listen to much of it,” he admits.
Overall, for Minnick, Robots was more of a learning process than an instant classic. The band was able to experiment and try different things, especially Fitts who grew into a flawless timekeeper. Minnick, meanwhile, first began thinking about how to make vocal tracks more creative while still maintaining the energy.
“I just put things where they sounded good,” he says. “I wanted to sound insane. I wanted to sound out of breath all the time.”
What did Minnick think of the record’s reception at the time? “It was our first record to be reviewed everywhere, outside of Vegas and California. I think a lot of people who saw us wanted those songs played at shows, wanted another Robots. But I think we found ourselves on our very last album. I wish we had had more time to record it.
“But I get email messages from kids today saying Robots is their all-time favorite record, and they listen to it everyday,” he continues. “I recently looked at some old YouTube comments for Robots, and it’s really interesting to see how hyped people were at the time, how they made up stories and myths about the band. Some of that is cool.”
Lately, Minnick has been feeling the itch to do music again. (He currently works as a video editor in Chicago.) When Thrice last came to town, Minnick got onstage to sing the last song with them, jumping into the crowd for a mere 30 seconds.
“I fucked up my leg,” he laughs. “I’ve been limping for a week. But now I’m thinking of doing some stuff. I wouldn’t start a band and tour, though. I have too many dogs. I can’t leave them!”
Minnick admits he still listens to Robots from time to time, even if some of his performances on the album make him cringe.
“I’m still happy I did that band instead of going to college.”
Jarret Keene is a contributing music editor and writer for Vegas Seven Magazine. You can read more from Keene at weeklyseven.com.
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