By Deuce

“If we live all our lives under lies, it becomes difficult to see anything if it does not have anything to do with these lies. If it is, for example, true or, say, honest. The idea that things of this nature continue to exist is not ever brought forward in our minds.” Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, Home, from the preface of “cuba libre”, 1966.

The face, and not the façade, of the truth is terrible in its starkness. It’s oftentimes subjective, or at least gauzed in layers of deliberate sophistry to make one think it’s subjective. But as KRS1 once observed, the truth, as it exists without any other qualifications, can always be questioned. The layers, the lies, the opinions and falsehoods, may be unwoven and peeled away for the truth to be beheld as sublime and iridescent, or as dark and as dingy, as it is without qualifications.

Or, as Post Death Soundtrack front man Steven Moore put it on the band’s fourth album, Veil Lifter, one can simply lift the veil of ignorance.

“Lifting the veil of ignorance is kind of twofold,” Moore revealed. “It just sort of means lifting that illusion so that you see everything as one sort of organism working with itself, working together. One energy. The other meaning that I’ve found is not telling yourself platitudes all the time and just seeing things clearly. Many people find that really tough to do. Just seeing things as they are, even if it’s challenging. Even if it’s difficult.”

“Elvis was a hero to most/ but he never meant shit to me/ straight up racist that sucker was simple and plain/ motherf*ck him and John Wayne,” Pubic Enemy, “Fight The Power”, Music From Do The Right Thing, 1989.

Veil Lifter is 11 tracks of unadulterated, unfiltered, hard-hitting heavy metal menace. It’s unflinching, pulls no punches, and is edgy electric guitar-infused rock that resounds in speakers, headphones, and trunks alike.

It may be interesting to note that on some levels, the album’s genesis occurred back in the early 1990’s when Moore, then just a fledgling junior high school student not yet indoctrinated into the world of music, got a heady dose of the foregoing Public Enemy song. That experience, coupled with that of listening to Nirvana’s In Utero, helped to solidify some of the early thought and emotional processes for what would become the motif for Veil Lifter decades later.

For the 12 year-old dealing with clinical depression and instances of bullying in private school, the influence of these two groups was nothing short of a breakthrough.

“I just thought, everybody just has a script; everybody lies,” Moore reminisced about the epoch in which he was listening to this music. “My parents have a script. They can’t really check me. Teachers have a script. Chuck D and Flavor Flav, they’re saying what the hell they goddamn want to. Same thing with Kurt Cobain and I thought, that’s what I want to do.”

Moore wrote the majority of Veil Lifter himself. Initially worked out as a series of electric guitar riffs and sentiments he recorded on his phone, the songs were then fleshed out by the songwriter’s lyrics—some of which were penned to the music, others of which came directly from what he affectionately calls his “lyrics bible”.

After four albums with Post Death Soundtrack and work in bands going at least as far back as 25 years, such a compendium of poetry, rhymes, and lyrics comes easily to the musician. Jon Ireson added a touch of bass and pre-engineering on the tracks before Moore knocked out the vocals and the harmonies. When the time was right, the duo—although Ireson has since left the band—sent it to Casey Lewis to add live drums, mix the project, and master it.

The subject matter on Veil Lifter is deliberately heavy, as the title of the project implies. Much of it pertains to providing a form of sonic outreach for those who are experiencing difficulties in today’s world, or recovering from them, or simply trying to avoid going through them at all.

“This is very much music for people who have died to the false world,” Moore emphasized. “It’s like letting go of illusion, letting go of ignorance, letting go of platitudes. You know, all that. Dead to the false world. I’m still very much alive but I’m dead to the false world.”

Moore is currently composing numbers for PDS’ fifth studio album and working hard on an EP with Texas rapper J’Morris.

“95 percent of music out there has a lot of mainstream qualities to it,” Moore intoned. “There’s even artists who ask to be guided on their sound, which I think is really disgusting, you know? I think there’s room for some just raw, from the soul, uncensored stuff. I think it’s important.”