Color me with your bruises
Decorate me with your scars
Give me all your misery
Take it all out on me
Suffering is a lousy teacher, and some of its most devoted students graduate straight into the business of making everybody else miserable. There is a peculiar human perversity in taking the cruelty once inflicted upon us and turning it into an instrument of authority, as though becoming the executioner might somehow erase the humiliation of having been the victim. Power becomes a cheap substitute for healing, and revenge masquerades as justice. The tragedy is that pain, left to govern the imagination, can make tyranny seem like self-preservation. And so the wounded become the wounders, perpetuating the very misery they sought to escape.
Hailing from Helsinki, Finland, Suzi Sabotage has made something of a career out of examining the less flattering aspects of human behavior, preferably accompanied by enough electronic horsepower to make the examination a public spectacle. Her latest track takes aim at the peculiar moral bankruptcy of people who convert their personal traumas into permission slips for cruelty. Everyone has suffered, everyone has grievances, and somewhere out there somebody is compiling an elaborate inventory of injustices to justify treating the next innocent person like absolute garbage.
Ultimately, the song concerns a disturbing transaction in which suffering becomes authority and innocent people are made to settle somebody else’s emotional debts. Sabotage gives that ugly arrangement a vicious electronic accompaniment, leaving its perpetrators precious little room for excuses.
The music makes a persuasive case for confronting this wretched business at 130 beats per minute. A relentless drum machine establishes the pace while serrated sawtooth synthesizers tear through the arrangement with the mechanical precision of factory equipment operating well beyond its recommended capacity. Higher, keening synth figures introduce an almost unbearable tension, their piercing tones climbing above the muscular low end. Sabotage’s voice moves between stern accusation and spectral detachment, occasionally suggesting someone who has become so accustomed to witnessing cruelty that ordinary outrage seems insufficient.
Her affection for 80s electronic music is unmistakable, although the production possesses a contemporary physicality that gives every programmed impact considerable force. The melodic elements provide a strange, almost celestial counterweight to the aggression below, creating an atmosphere in which beauty and brutality occupy the same cramped psychological quarters. One can imagine the track filling a club while half the audience contemplates its emotional implications and the other half enthusiastically contributes to somebody else’s tinnitus.
Listen to Sacrifice below or via the streaming service of your choice and order the single here
Sabotage, whose catalogue includes Persona Non Grata, Love at First Bite, and Nazi Goths, Fuck Off, has never been especially interested in making herself agreeable. The latter song subsequently attracted covers from The Cassandra Complex and Tears for the Dying, while her work with British post-punk veterans Ausgang further established her international connections.
Not one to rest on her laurels, Sabotage takes her politics beyond the recording studio. Her Goths For Palestine compilations have raised over $13,500, bringing together artists including A Place to Bury Strangers, Rubella Ballet, and Zanias.
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The post “Give Me All Your Misery” — Finnish Darkwave Artist Suzi Sabotage Confronts the Collateral Damage of Cruelty With “Sacrifice” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
