Brave Saint Saturn: Anti-Meridian (2008)

With five years between The Light of Things Hoped For and this release, I started to think we’d never get the end of the astronauts’ story.  But just like the Gloria emerges at last from the dark side of Titan, so Brave Saint Saturn returned in the end with this final chapter.  With a superb array of songs and an overall theme of coming home, Anti-Meridian closes the Brave Saint Saturn trilogy with a bang.

 

Story first:  the astronauts have returned to earth, where they receive a hero’s welcome.  The CD liner notes and a few spoken tracks on the album fill in the gaps – trapped in a geosynchronous orbit, the Gloria was detonated to propel the flight of the Starling, an escape pod.  I’m not up on my technobabble, but suffice it to say that the blast proves a new method of antimatter creation, making the voyage and subsequent return of the astronauts even more historic.  

 

Not many songs deal directly with the plot.  Dennis Culp’s “Hero’s Homecoming” is clearly the most explicit, exploring the exhilaration, joy, and also regret (not everyone made it home) of the heroes as they ride through the streets during their welcome-home parade.  Beyond that, the final two tracks on the album, “These Frail Hands” and “Invictus,” beautifully carry the metaphor of darkness from The Light of Things Hoped For and bring it at last into the light.  “These Frail Hands” is especially masterful – it might be my favorite Brave Saint Saturn song of all time.  With a gentle melody that starts plaintively and grows into an anthem that incorporates choruses from the previous two albums, it’s gorgeous to listen to, and the lyrics are astounding.  I’m seriously resisting the urge to quote the entire thing right now, but I’ll begrudgingly content myself with a single stanza:  “Darkness can’t perceive the light, / Though lightlessness has chilled us numb, / And though its wings may cloud the skies, / The dark shall never overcome.”  I mean, come on!

 

Several other numbers touch on the light-and-dark imagery.  “Through Depths of Twilight” is a thoughtful piece that champions those who’ve brought hope in dark times, particularly highlighting Abraham Lincoln’s “better angels” and the “thunderous words” of Martin Luther King, Jr.  The terrific “Always Just Beneath the Dawn” reaches from son to father in an effort to connect.  The chorus is stellar, and I love the lyric, “In my bones, / Your twenty-three same chromosomes / Reside in twisted prophecy, / Likening our destinies.”

 

The songs on this album have the widest range of subject matter on the trilogy.  Some, like “Starling” and “Blessed are the Land Mines,” are social-message songs.  Though “Starling” starts as a denouncement of killing animals for sport, it gradually works its way to the larger issue of disposable people or nations falling victims to others’ power-lust or fear-mongering.  Likewise, “Blessed are the Land Mines” is a darkly ironic rock number that condemns war-profiteering in general, and more specifically, support within institutionalized religion for war – or as the song puts it, “the church who rattles sabers.”  On a different note, Culp’s “Fields of the Fallen” is lovely, moody, and mournful, and “Fortress of Solitude” is one of the coolest songs I’ve heard about a superhero.  I’ll cop to loving the combination of superheroes and modern rock, and this song is a bang-up example.  I especially like the line, “This prison of mine / Is to carry alone / The light of one red sun / Beneath my skin, / And never, ever go home.”  Tons of variety here, with lots to love!

 

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I'll probably talk more about the Emmy nominations later, but I just have to geek out over Laverne Cox's nomination for Orange is the New Black.  First trans* person in history to receive an acting nomination for the Emmys (and I imagine for all the major Hollywood awards) - the barriers that woman has broken down in the past year blow my mind.  The tip of my hat to Ms. Cox.

Brave Saint Saturn: The Light of Things Hoped For (2003)

 

Brave Saint Saturn’s sophomore release is possibly its best.  While So Far From Home is an excellent debut and some of the band’s finest songs can be found on Anti-Meridian, The Light of Things Hoped For is the most consistently good.  There’s a ton of great songs on it, and it’s a more mature album than So Far From Home musically, lyrically, and thematically.

 

In terms of plot, we learn that the U.S.S. Gloria has disappeared behind the dark side of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.  Cut off from light and radio contact, unable to get out, the crew is utterly alone.  “Alone” is the watchword for this album.  While So Far From Home deals with loneliness, The Light of Things Hoped For is about being separated from everything you know, with no light and no help, but, impossibly, still a glimmer of hope.  By the end of the album, Mission Control receives a miraculous transmission from the crew.  Compared to the first CD, the story is woven more into the actual album here.  There are more spoken interludes in the music, some of which are dramatized news reports and radio transmissions (including the final triumphant message from the Gloria.)

 

Additionally, the story finds its way more explicitly into some of the songs themselves.  The dark “Titan” is about a seemingly insurmountable feeling of despair.  The song has an oppressive, claustrophobic feel, and Reese Roper sings, “I’m afraid I’ll never see the light.”  Emotionally, this is the nadir of the album, maybe of the entire trilogy, but it’s answered by “Daylight,” the final track.  It starts out similarly dsolate, with the haunting lyrics, “And the darkness crept its way, / Like stars we know will die too soon. / There is never any sunrise here / In the shadows of eclipsing moons.”  However, the song builds to an ecstatic finish with a direct message to Jesus.  Hopeless though things have seemed, Roper realizes that Christ still held him when he “bled in darkness,” and only He can bring the daylight that will save him.

 

Hope is an important secondary theme of the album, ever-present despite the overarching melancholy.  The first song on the album is “The Sun Also Rises” – a Hemingway reference, yes, but also an affirmation that, no matter how dark things get, the morning will come again.  “I Fell Away,” a catchy number that riffs on the story of Icarus, begins with a fall of heaven but ends with a battered soul and broken wings being mended.  Another song, “Binary,” is a quiet and sad ode to lost love (evidently, Roper had more feelings to work out.)  It has some desperately sad lyrics, but also one of the most uplifting lines I’ve ever heard:  “And in the dark we climb the slope / ‘Cause the bravest thing of all is always hope.”  Just like courage is boldest when we’re afraid, hope is never more important than when things seem hopeless.

 

A few unrelated songs bear mentioning.  “Anastasia” at first feels starkly out of place on a Brave Saint Saturn album, being a happy love song, but it’s beautifully sweet.  In the midst of the darkness that pervades the other numbers, Anastasia is light.  The soft elegy “Estrella” is an unflinching self-reflection, as Roper examines his own faith after seeing the “true and fierce” belief of a dying friend.  Finally, “Heart Still Beats,” written and sung by band member Dennis Culp, is another entreaty to reach out to the suffering.  I’m most moved by Culp’s description of a homeless girl; in a line that makes incredible emotional sense, he sings, “Behind a veil of bleached thin hair, her eyes tell a story, / Like a photo of Berlin, December 1944.”  Culp urges himself as well as us to step in and give a little comfort in the face of pain and isolation.

Brave Saint Saturn: So Far From Home (2000)

 

As a band, Brave Saint Saturn had an interesting life.  It was the moody, atmospheric rock off-shoot of Christian rock/ska giant Five Iron Frenzy, and its three studio albums are unusual in that they have an overarching plot.  They don’t constitute a rock opera, like Tommy or American Idiot, and many of the songs themselves only hint at the story.  In the liner notes of each album, however, the band members become astronauts aboard the USS Gloria, on their way to Saturn.  They’re photographed in uniform, and spoken interludes in the music offer glimpses of the crew as they make their long journey.  Each album tells part of the story and centers around a different theme, so I figured I ought to talk about all three in succession.  (Disclaimer:  if there’s such a thing as spoilers for a CD, be advised that I’ll be mentioning important events from the story of the album.)

 

So Far From Home, the band’s debut, deals with the theme of loneliness, the pressing isolation of space during a years-long voyage to Saturn.  Of the albums in the trilogy, it has the least amount of “plot” woven into the songs.  The only spoken segments are archival – a transmission from the Apollo 8, the countdown from the Challenger, and a clip of Dylan Thomas reading “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” – but liner-note story ends with the grim revelation that Mission Control has lost contact with the USS Gloria and the fate of the astronauts is unknown.

 

As for the music itself, the theme of loneliness is explored in numerous ways.  Front man and songwriter Reese Roper was dealing with a broken engagement at the time the album was written, and the loss of his fiancée is apparent.  It is addressed most clearly in “Independence Day,” which speaks directly to the fiancée about the day she broke things off.  “Two-Twenty-Nine” is about another kind of loss, the death of Roper’s grandmother.

 

The space motif threads through several numbers, including “Space Robot Five” and “Moon Burns Bright.”  In particular, “Space Robot Five” is excellent, an emotional number about a robot sent up because “the deep of space is no place for a fragile human soul.”  Despite his allegedly cold interior, though, he still pines for a woman back on earth.  “Moon Burns Bright” is also about a woman, in a manner of speaking.  It’s sung by an astronaut as a sort of love song to the moon.  Others tell him the journey isn’t worth the danger and resources, but she’s “the reason every astronaut would fly,” and he’s not about to listen to them because “none of them see the heavens” from his vantage point.

 

Another important theme doesn’t really fit the astronaut storyline, but it’s very apropos for these particular musicians.  Just as Five Iron Frenzy frequently wrote about the “least of these,” so Brave Saint Saturn continues this idea with “Under Bridges,” a quiet song that looks for Jesus in the faces of the poor and suffering.  A cover of Michael W. Smith’s “Rocketown” elaborates on the same theme, although not as bitingly.

 

My favorite song on the album isn’t about loss or space or charity.  “Resistor” gorgeously reaches out a hand to an unnamed Little Sister wrestling with issues of self-worth.  Though “Dad says that she could be could be anything she wants to be, / She only sees what she is not,” and she seeks solitude while she rages at this condition.  Gently, the song invites the “broken-heart resistor” to come back to where she is safe and loved.