Post-hardcore was a pretty solid idea: answer the "What if we tripled the speed and intensity of punk?" question posed by hardcore itself with the yes-and of "What if we had some actual fucking tunes?". I've probably tipped my hand to the next half of this intro, though, which is that how well this worked out in practice came down into just how post the post-hardcore proved to be.
British post-hardcore had its moment early into the 21st century, happily coinciding with both my awareness that pop-punk was digging itself into something of a rut, and being able to visit my childhood home often enough to check out MTV Rocks for weeks at a time. As a result, I had both the motive and opportunity to watch the battle for dominance of the post-hardcore scene across These Isles unfold in real time.
For me there was only one winner. It wasn't Wilt, actually, who imploded not too after "Take Me Home" was released. There was a sense it might have been, though, had things been different.
"Take Me Home" is a malfunctioning machine of a song. Or maybe not malfunctioning, but certainly not operating in the manner intended. From the submerged opening riff to the jagged slash that heralds the verse resetting along a new vector, there's clearly moving parts generating momentum, but it's not clear that we're going anywhere.
This is an impression subtly alluded to in the video by the band performing inside a circle of what look not just like camera rails, but train tracks. The lyrics contribute here too, returning to diagonally-adjacent themes again and again, like a looped record inside a fever dream. Our narrator is bringing people through the ground, watching them travel through time, and exhorting them to escape, all while himself being trapped in what might well be an asylum, as he plays the role of holy madman.
There's a sense the machine is running out of time, too, not because (or not just because) of its own increasing erraticness, but because of an impending disaster. "Take the last plane if you can" our narrator begs, one of several lines which recall Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (again, this is underlined by the rain of ash that falls upon the band in the latter stages of the video). The machine is glitching, but so is the world; something is coming so powerful it will derail the concept of time itself.
And I guess I could relate, if only a little. It's objectively insane to link the concept of a global pandemic to coming to the end of your undergraduate degree - I didn't need COVID to tell me that. But thematic resonance has a habit of completely ignoring a sense of proportion. Especially sat in the house that I no longer lived in, about to leave the latest in a series of rented rooms I'd inhabited for a maximum of two years in a row each, facing a future in which the only certainty was how much of the past would no longer live on it.
Plus, atop everything else, Twelve Monkeys is an extremely off-kilter love story - a romance as presented by a broken Hollywood machine. Our narrator wants - needs - someone to take him home. But like James Cole is he looking for an escape route, or a place to live, or simply someone to lose himself in for a little while? Whichever it was, grappling with an approaching red line of a future, fighting to find the right pills to keep my head level, and defining myself by my singlehood in a way 45-year-old me feels nauseous recalling, Cormac Battle's anguished yell gave me everything I needed.
Someone. Please. Please.
Take me home.
B-side
