Victor! Fix The Sun - Person Place Or Thing

Vic­tor! Fix The Sun
Per­son Place Or Thing
Fric­tion; 2009

Hav­ing spent a fair amount of time in my life sit­ting in churches and lis­ten­ing to a wide vari­ety of preach­ers speak­ing (pri­mar­ily to the already con­verted), I have a spe­cial lit­tle place in my heart for the clichéd idiom that is the street preacher. These folks are never with­out a soap­box, whether lit­eral or fig­u­ra­tive, as they seek to con­vince the greater world around them that we’re all headed in a very scary direc­tion. They have the inher­ent (and annoy­ing) abil­ity to reduce com­plex the­o­log­i­cal ideas to mere slo­ga­neer­ing in hopes of catch­ing the atten­tion of at least one passerby. But what I do find appeal­ing is the strange mix­ture of intesti­nal for­ti­tude and utter lack of shame that allows such peo­ple to stand up tall to preach their beliefs at oth­ers with an unre­lent­ing spirit in the face of oppo­si­tion and indif­fer­ence.

And this is what I hear in the music of Vic­tor! Fix The Sun – an irre­press­ible, in-​your-​face atti­tude that desires to show you that there is a dif­fer­ent way, a way that’s con­trary to the sta­tus quo. Admit­tedly, this Grand Rapids, MI-​based trio is more inter­ested in sub­vert­ing typ­i­cal rock-​n-​roll for­mu­las than sav­ing our eter­nal souls, but the pas­sions come from the same place. With Per­son Place Or Thing, these three gen­tle­men com­bine aspects of punk, hard­core, and math rock into a loud, aggres­sive post­core aggre­gate that brings to mind At The Drive In and Dischord Records.

What really allows for the street preacher metaphor to work here is that band’s sound fea­tures repet­i­tive lyrics and musi­cal themes bel­lowed with a furi­ous inten­sity that leaves the lis­tener with an uncom­fort­able, dis­qui­et­ing feel­ing in his/​her gut. Vic­tor! Fix The Sun is no feel-​good preacher hop­ing to give you warm fuzzies in your belly and woo you with pie-​in-​the-​sky promises; what we have here is an itin­er­ant evan­ge­list exist­ing pri­mar­ily on cof­fee, cig­a­rettes, anger, and adrenaline.

Yet, despite the pres­ence of heavy, thun­der­ous instru­men­ta­tion, Per­son Place Or Thing suf­fers from a rel­a­tive thin­ness in tex­ture and a pre­cip­i­tous mood, as if the band is perched on a cliff and is ready to jump. More­over, with three tracks of six min­utes or more, ones that could and should have been bro­ken up into smaller, more digestible chunks, it appears that the band attempted to cram too many ideas into only six songs. Like that tired, wan­der­ing soul with his “me-​against-​the-​world” men­tal­ity, try­ing so dili­gently to do all he can with what time he has left, there’s often very lit­tle dense meat on the bones of this music, and what remains is tough and stringy from overuse and a lack of rest.

Please don’t mis­un­der­stand me – there’s much that I do enjoy with the music of Vic­tor! Fix The Sun. Namely, it’s the group’s unwa­ver­ing, per­sis­tent spirit, one that screams out, “I want you to hear what I have to say, whether you want to hear it or not!” I need voices like that in my music and in my life, as I have dif­fi­culty employ­ing such a voice myself. Unfor­tu­nately, like those same street preach­ers with their sim­ple, black-​and-​white ser­mons that are bereft of nuance, Per­son Place Or Thing can only scream in my ears for so long before I ignore it, con­tent to file the record away on my shelves until I think I need to hear its stark, dark mes­sage once again.