Music Box | Overlooked Albums: Set Fire to Flames

Mike Newmark Columnist

Set Fire to Flames
Sings Reign Rebuilder
[Alien 8; 2001]

In Cormac McCarthy’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, a father and a son traverse an ashen landscape after an apocalyptic event kills nearly everything. They don’t know where they are or where they’re going. Life is a daily struggle to find what little food still exists, to hide from road stalkers who want to eat them, and to believe in the rescue they secretly know will never come.

Reading The Road didn’t feel right unless I paired it with Set Fire to Flames’ Sings Reign Rebuilder, not only because both are melancholic works that utilize a poetic sense of restraint, but also because they zero in on the effects of isolation. Sings Reign Rebuilder materialized when 13 members of Montreal instrumental rock groups (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, A Silver Mt. Zion and Fly Pan Am) locked themselves in a dilapidated house and recorded music for five straight days, intending to find out what they could produce under those circumstances. The Road’s protagonists move through the world cut off from nearly everything that is redemptive; Sings Reign Rebuilder is the aural document of what it’s like to live that way.

Despite the close relation to GY!BE, Sings Reign Rebuilder doesn’t sound like bombs bursting in air; it sounds like 13 people locked in a house on very little sleep and in various levels of intoxication. The guitars, basses, drums, cellos, violins, tape loops and field recordings stay close to the gutter, often assuming a Labradford-like minimalism that’s achingly sad. When the crescendos do come, they offer no release. The 10-minute buildup of “Shit-Heap-Gloria of the New Town Planning” moves from despair to dread; the breakbeats on “There Is No Dance in Frequency and Balance” are blackened in soot. The final minutes of “Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear” are so horrifying, it’s as though Set Fire to Flames wrote them specifically for The Road’s infamous scene in which the two look for food in an abandoned house only to find rotting, screaming humans being held as livestock.

Most effective are the field recordings of derelicts interspersed throughout the music. “I have very much knowledge of what’s going on in this world and it’s cruel, it’s inhumane,” mutters one in “Côte d’Abrahams Roomtone,” who sounds about 95 years old and sick of being alive. Set Fire to Flames plant their microphone in the realm of the untouchables who are forced to brave the world alone—a venture that few musicians have dared to undertake to such an extent. Certainly, however, their experiences and attitudes have been shared by the band members and, at some point, by all of us. That is why Sings Reign Rebuilder is essential listening.