I’ve been sitting with a bad case of writer’s block for the past month or so because I’ve been obsessing over a guy who makes real loud music. I have since concluded that I Can Not Move On until I talk about Alex Bradshaw, aka “Alex CF,”1 and the poetic cosmologies he’s crafted over the course of a 20+ year career as an artist, writer and crust punk vocalist.
THE WARREN OF SNARES
FALL OF EFRAFA is obviously not the first band to ever use its music to tell stories. That’s a pretty basic staple of most music since forever. It isn’t even the sole band in the 2000s to lay claim to the form of the “rock opera,” if we want to really be pretentious; GREEN DAY made American Idiot in 2004 and COHEED AND CAMBRIA was neck-deep in its “Amory Wars” saga straight through 2005. But FALL OF EFRAFA is, I can confidently say, the only band in rock music whose rock opera was a critical, explicitly anarchist, vegan straight-edge, three-album reverse retelling of Richard Adams’ Watership Down.
From 2005 to 2009, FALL OF EFRAFA released Owsla, Elil and Inlé, starting with the destruction of Efrafa and working backwards. You can hear the sonic evolution the band undergoes through each album, starting in a place we might call “classic crust” (evoking hints of AMEBIX, DISCHARGE, and TRAGEDY [or HIS HERO IS GONE]) and ending in a much more metallic place. EFRAFA was of a piece with other contemporaneous so-called “emo crust” bands from Spain, Italy and elsewhere in its use of cellos, piano and violin on top of the more typical crust/metal instrumentation.
But look, just describing it does it no favors. It has to be listened to, read, felt.
- the “CF” stands for “chronic fatigue;” dude’s been making all this music since 2005 with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis
Here’s a song off Owsla, “A Soul to Bear.” (Lyrics below.)
Man built god;
dragged himself upon a pedestal
kicked dirt in the faces of all other life
Crowned himself as deity
What animal separates this ape from that?
The human animal; ignored and loathed by louse and lion
Revel in our glory, in every brother is quarry
Butcher every life, until our land is stained and dead
From our towers we cry “every man shall bear a soul,
a right that no other beast shall bear”
and in the shadows the dogs shook their heads
“shame upon those apes, pride comes before a fall”
I’ve listened to a lot of vegan straight-edge bands, and I’ll be honest: they’re not known for their poetics, preferring instead to be blunt and to the point. (Bands like EARTH CRISIS tend to be the exception.) What I love about this is that, it’s a pretty typical xvx song in terms of content, but it’s expressed extremely beautifully: “Revel in our glory, in every brother is quarry?” shit fucking slaps. But nothing goes quite as hard as “SHAME UPON THOSE APES.” You can imagine the circle pit, wall of death, or crowd-killers going fucking wild at this moment. By itself, I’d say a song like “A Soul to Bear” would sell me on EFRAFA.
But as I mentioned, Owsla is the starting point for the band, not its terminus; we need to listen to something off Inlé to get the picture of their evolution.
“Republic of Heaven” (lyrics below.)
We wane in remembrance,
Drained by our scorn.
The flocks of the patriarch throttled,
Forlorn.
We gasp with epiphany,
Perception unmasked.
Ranks of black muslin litter out path.
Empyrian empties,
On our woeful malaise,
Engulfs and entwines our impious parade.
These are the embers,
The fetid ideal,
The end of our chastity,
Allow us to feel.
Nerves remain tender,
To touch makes us cry.
We see through these windows now become eyes.
Our burden is heavy,
As we ascend.
Like blemished flesh,
The earth seems to rent.
Pustules of faces,
Mouths like crevasse,
Our weathered coherence lost to morass.
Our debts are paid to this epoch,
Sanctimonious,
No remorse.
The king is dead!
The king is dead!
We bound his face!
Cut off his head!
We spit at thee,
We curse at thee,
The king is dead!
Brothers and sisters,
The king is dead!
Cut him down,
Flay his skin,
Our god is dead!
Courtisans!
Compatriots!
Lend me your ears,
We slayed this demagogue,
Dragged it to its knees.
We cut all the sycophants,
Deafened their call,
We gave back the willing to better us all.
We will not go quiet,
We will not be restrained,
We will not be slaves to an impotent regime.
Mark this in remembrance,
The turning of tides.
Our nascent republic,
Born of (his) demise.
The nativity!
Our elegy!
To this reform!
This track is significantly longer (though by no means the longest-ever song in EFRAFA’s discography) and is much more black metal or post-metal-inspired than just straight crust. What I genuinely love about this song is the description of the uprising: “These are the embers; the fetid ideal. The end of our chastity allows us to feel. Nerves remain tender; to touch makes us cry. We see through these windows now become eyes.” These lyrics accompany the sense that people are regaining a vital lost connection at the very tail end of a totalitarian regime, a brief moment of freedom from any ruler or demagogue, before of course (in the fiction) the tyranny of Woundwort moves in to replace the old king.
This is a great place to bring up the fascinating infusion of atheism into all of Alex CF’s projects. From what I’m able to gather, it’s not an atheism borne out of a blasé rejection of any and all spiritual beliefs, but specifically based on an opposition to the state ideologies that arise from religions. This is how we can get (on the one hand) songs interspersed with excerpts of Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and (on the other hand) an entire book describing anarchist demons (The Book of Venym, an illustrated “Egalitarian Demonology” that Alex wrote later).
To this end, the middle album of The Warren of Snares Trilogy, Elil, specifically addresses the role religion can play in the setting-up of a dictatorship, examining and critiquing the religious underpinning of Efrafa and how its triumvirate of deities – The Black Rabbit of Inlé, for whom Woundwort was allegedly a first cousin; El-ahrairah, the Prince With A Thousand Enemies; and Lord Frith, the sun – served to enforce the militaristic structure of the warren and its massive owsla.
The thing about the songs on Elil is that they’re fucking long – there are only three tracks on the album and each one exceeds the 20-minute mark. And honestly, this album has a lot in common with something like F# A# ∞ by GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR both in form and content. That’s decidedly challenging to listen to! But I find songs like “For El-ahrairah to Cry” extremely rewarding to sit with. It’s got sludge, it’s got post-rock, it’s also got a whole midsection that sounds like it came whole-cloth from TRAGEDY – it fucks, in other words.
FALL OF EFRAFA is maybe Alex CF’s best-known band among fans of punk, hardcore and metal. It’s a genuinely wild project, something we might categorize as fanfiction in the most laudatory sense. I love it to pieces. If it was the only thing Alex ever did, it would be a crowning achievement in itself. But he’s been busy! Let’s talk about MOMENTUM and LIGHT BEARER.
THE INTERIM PROJECTS
MOMENTUM was a hardcore band that released two pretty straight-ahead punk albums: Whetting Occam’s Razor and Herbivore. The former album is loosely based on the humanist work of Carl Sagan; the latter is uncompromising vegan straight-edge hardcore. These are great records and feature a lot of really poetic lyrics from Alex CF, but you’re not going to find a “grand narrative” here. The message, however? Real fuckin important.
LIGHT BEARER is a post-metal project that seeks to do for His Dark Materials what FALL OF EFRAFA did for Watership Down. I will be so straight up with you, though: I haven’t had the patience to sit with this project for long. The only album on Bandcamp is Silver Tongue, and doesn’t come with lyrics, but it is free. The rest of their discography is on other streaming services, like Apple Music and Spotify, but yeah – of all the stuff, this is probably the stuff I’m least familiar with.
CARNIST is another vegan hardcore project that fucks pretty hard. Their album Unlearn has a song called “Eating Children” on it that’s about how fucked it is to eat lamb. “For fans of angry vegan feminist hardcore, Dropdead, Trial, Propagandhi, Infest, siege, Protestant. Best enjoyed whilst drinking a nice cup of tea.” I sure am, buds.
WORST WITCH is a queer vegan DIY punk band that talks about struggling with identity, dealing with misogynists and homophobes, carnivore culture, reckoning with white supremacy and the ways social media rots our brains.
Alright I think this is as good a place as any to pause. I’m gonna put part two up about the NORR SAGA here later. Lemme know if you enjoy this obsessive deep dive into the works of a single dude from Brighton!